>>Thanks for your reply, i changed the files to 254 and rebooted but still got the same error, any other suggestions
>
>Other than switching to NT, I can't think of any. What was the FILES= setting before you changed it, and the exact line that you set it to; CONFIG.SYS is funny about things like spaces on the line; IOW:
>
>FILES=254
>
>is OK, but
>
>FILES = 254
>
>may not be

There's a sys(2010) function which should return 255 in VFP (in previous versions it returned the FILES setting from config.sys). Whoever had this problem should heck it in the Help, there's some interesting text about the number of files that can be open simultaneously in VFP. Though, this sounds contradictory - VFP should never choke on this, because why would they ever increase the number of work areas to 32K - they could have happily left it at 255 if this setting still mattered.

If I remember the original problem well, we had about 120 tables open, and then if they had memos and/or indexes, it would increase the number of open files to more than 255. This makes me wonder if the 255 file handles limit applies, or is this a problem on that one machine only? I've never had so many tables open at the same time. Maybe it's none of my business to judge, but if any significant group among these tables have a common structure, I'd rather keep them as one table, and have one procedure at the end of the processing to dispatch the changes into individual tables, if they really have to exist. I've had a system with 100-150 tables with identical structure, but no workstation ever had to open more than three at a time.