Bob,

First let me say that I agree that the future will (most likely) see more diversity and not less.

Sounds pretty "standard" to me, all around, though it remains true that I have not heard of that video stuff before this.

I've read (PC Mag) of some occasions where WIn (and, it seems, Win98 more so) occasionally 'loses' some disk files, including driver parts, etc. There is some facility of Win98 which even (as I understand it) checks the state of critical files and 'refreshes' any which it feels are in doubt.

I don't run defrag much at all. Having heard those stories about losing disk bits, I choose not to tempt the damned thing by giving it extra opportunity.

What I can tell you is that I have never (and I see others saying the same thing) heard of anything VFP related as being suspect of crapping out a FAT system.

Might you have the 2 machines networked, and if so, might there have been something done over the network which did your FAT in? Also if networked, is the other machine Win95 or Win98?

Do you use a 'cable' modem and service, and, if so, might there have been something come through there that messed the FAT up? I don't use cable service for communications, but I understand that at least some implementations (the one locally here for sure) essentially puts you as a member of a network where others with the same service *could* access the machine.

Could you be having an overheating problem? Real weird things can happen in such cases, and I wouldn't rule anything out in such a case. Since you seem to mainly use VFP on the machine in question it *could* look like a VFP problem when in fact it is a overheating problem.

I'm afraid that I cannot help you out much here. But at the cost of good video cards these days I feel that there is a good chance that, if nothing else, you can get superior performance and much nicer colors by changing to a more 'recognized' card with more RAM on it. I like to tell the story of my DX266 sitting besdie a P90, the DX2 having a ATI 4 meg card and the P90 having a 1 mrg Trident card. Just scrolling through a Word document of several pages the DX2 made the P90 look like a 286! The difference was dramatic!

Sorry, and good luck,

Jim N

>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