>The reason I'm so annoyed is because I know that these types of problems have always been the bane of XBase, and I can't figure why MS decided to use what appears to be two different mechansims for update: one that fixes the problem and one that makes it worse.

Your annoyance is understood, but that doesn't change the fact that this is very likely NOT VFP's fault. I don't understand why the file doesn't fix itself after the first problem, unless that same user continues to append reords without the table being closed and reopened.

Is this with 6.0?

Transactions do not change anything about the tableupdate process. They cause the behavior to be;

1) Secure all locks that are necessary to complete the tableupdate
2) continue until end transaction
3) at end transaction actually do the updates.

I recall that a change was made to transactions in the recent past, perhaps wht 6.0 or SP3 that stopped getting and holding the ehader lock as doing that cuase donly one user to be able to append a record at a time even though they were appending different records. If that was the cause then I would expect it to occur every time two users simultaneously append records. If that is the case then this is a bug and should be reported to MS pronto.