Thanks for your interest, Jim.

I've dug up the following information partly on faith, and that refers
to a hope that something productive may come of it. If your intent is
to say, "See, that's not very standard," then I revert to a previous
statement: The future will see more diversity rather than less, and it
doesn't matter much whether they can't fix it or they won't.

So, it's an AMD K6-2 processor, 333MHz, with an MB851 motherboard. It's
a Packard Bell Model 955, purchased new last November. Chip set is
SiS-5598-W877F with 2Mb video memory. 128Mb Ram, 8Gb on the IDE drive
I'm using. FAT32 without compression. OS is W98, full version number
is 4.10.1998, using an Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG. BIOS ID string is
06/25/63-SiS-2298-W877F-2A5IIG5CC-00. I don't carry a lot of extra
junk on it as it's basically a work machine. No video games, and I've
defragged, scanned, and virus-checked it frequently. VFP is the only
software which has behaved this way since I got the machine.

I can dig up similar information on the second machine, on which I had
the same problem with scrambled FAT tables. If this leads to productive
discussion I will do so eagerly.

Thanks.

-- Bob