Hi Dan.

This is actually two (or more <s>) separate problems.

>We believe that the error that we get is when two users are entering a form simultaneously.

I'm guessing your forms use views. There's a known problem in VFP regarding two or more users opening a view simultaneously: for a reason I can't fathom, VFP locks the DBC record for the view for the short period of time it takes to read the view definition. If a second person tries to open the view while this record is locked, they get the error you mentioned.

Several workarounds have been suggested here (look for a thread from a few weeks back on this topic), but the best one I heard is to create local DBCs for each user with just the view definitions (you could do it the first time a user runs the app, for example). That way, there'd never be a contention issue.

>Some other symptoms of the general problem is that sometimes all records related to a transaction are saved but one numeric field in a header table is left blank ( not 0 ). Sometimes an invalid PK is stored. We get duplicate PK's, even though this is supposed to be prevented by the framework.

This is another problem. There's a known issue with certain releases of Win95 that shows itself in VFP when updating tables via views: you get duplicate primary keys because the DBF is not being written to correctly. I can't remember the KB number, but it has a fix for the problem. This is not a VFP problem, but a Win95 DLL problem.

Another thing to consider: what Novell drivers are they using? Certain releases of Novell driver are notorious for corrupting data.

Doug