>Is there a way to zip and unzip tables from within Foxpro or Fox exes? I found nothing under the help index.
>

I've used PKUNZIP, building command lines from VFP and launching it with CreateProcess(), and have recently started playing with DynaZip, which is a third party utility that seems to work well.

The Zip format is not native to DOS/Windows, so you won't find anything in the MS-supplied documentation on them.

>Windows has its own compression tool. We ought to be able to call it from VFP, but how?
>

The decompression utility is available for redistribution (in fact, it's present in bith Win9x and NT 4), but you cannot legally redistribute the compression utility. The functionality to extract compressed files is also available through the Win32 SETUP API. You can call the DOS command line utility EXTRACT the same way you'd call PKUNZIP, via RUN or CreateProcess(); EXTRACT /? will list the command line parameters available for it.

>The goal is to enable a client to operate upon compressed data without manually decompressing/recompressing. Any ideas?

If you really need to compress data for other than data, you might consider putting the data on an NTFS volume and enabling NTFS compression tranmission purposes (IOW, store the data on a routine basis compressed by the NT operating system; I do not recommend using Novell's compression because of problems I've seen with some Novell Client software and compressed volumes). I've never been an advocate of any of the DriveSpace family of tools for Win9x, but they also can do on the fly compression and decompression without any special programming.