I'm afraid you're at the correct forum...
Well, Delphi isn't my cup of tea, but I used Paradox with VB.

Here are the reasons (to my knowledge) that can corrupt the database :

* several power off while database opened
* regarding Miscosft Jet engine command CompactDatabase : uncomplete (aborted) operation, then trying to open the inconsistent DB.
* network errors while editing tables (writing from cache to disk)
* compacting a base while someone else has opened it. Yes, there's, against the protection mecanism, a small possibility that this event ocur. We've experienced it.

HTH