Ok everybody I got it.

The Misc_Table table is the source for several combo lists in my Home form. They are all setup seperatly with their appropriate indexes in the DE of the form. It seems I made them all Read Only. When I changed the County one back to Read Write, following Perter's line of logic, I spaced on the others. Thus, the private data session the update utility from uses got the RO versions with the RW version. It was asked to Write to one instance and prohibited by the others. It freeked out updating the table but trashing the CDX.

By the way the errors were so strange that I could browse the table with Set Deleted turned on and off and get the data to appear and then disappear permanantly. Also, if I worked with the situation too long I could get all tags after county to be removed from the table permanantly.

Having now been through this mill I feel VFP might do well to trap this situation with its error handler as it does cause data to be trashed.

Thank you everone for your help.

Terry