>But Jim, the dbf file I'm sometimes get (when I don't get the error message "error writing to file" is only about 600 meg!!

Sandy,

Then you need to look to the network for the problem. It may be data caching or something else going on there. Essentially the error message says something went wrong when trying to write to the file. This usually means the OS returned an error to VFP when VFP requested the OS to write to the file.