I'll give it a try. See inline
>How does VFP retrieve data? For example, if client brings up a form, I know that a work area is created for each of the tables that are opened. In the work area, many things are stored including the indices of the table. Am I correct to say that the entire table is not stored in the work area?
To the best of my knowledge, VFP does not buffer the entire table, unless the table is very small. I'm not sure what determines or controls how much of the table is stored in the buffers.
>If the client were to navigate to a particular record, does VFP retrieve just that one record with the help of the index and sticks it in the work area or buffer?
I'm going to assume that you're not talking about the change buffer that is created by a call to CURSORSETPROP().
>How does the indices in the work area of one client get updated when another user updates the table, i.e. adds a record?
The buffers are periodically updated. See the SET REFRESH TO command.
>> When the user has a lock on a record (in pessimistic buffering), is the record in the table file (i.e. DBF file) marked with some value indicating that it is being locked by a user? If so, how does it know when the user is finished with the record, especially if the user does something like CTRL-ALT-DEL out of the system?
I'm not sure.
>I've been looking around for this info in the resources that I currently have which include the on-line library, MSDN, and a book (can't remember the name) with little success...at least so far.
MS really hasn't released a lot of this information. It surprises me that there's more information available about SQL and its query processor than VFP.
> We want to test out how much network traffic VFP causes when doing things like data retrieval and storage but in order to do that, we need to know some of the fundamentals. Can anyone help?
There is an article in the latest FoxPro Advisor that goes into bandwidth usage. You should check it out. It also contains an insert about how VFP uses indexes to solve queries.
-Mike
