Jim,

>With SP3 plus the ADO stuff, we must be awfully close (if not already there) to being able to write an out-process VFP server on Win9x that could service clients.
>

Sure, we could do that. People actually wrote database servers using VFP 2.0. The client would add its request to a dbf and wait for the results to show up on disk in a file. It worked, but it was a lot of work to do it. You could do it a lot more easily with COM and ADO, but it would still be a lot of work to duplicate a small portion of SQL Server's capabilities.

>
>A very expensive wheel (SQL Server or Oracle).
>

You can get a 25 user version of SQL Server for 3727.95 USD. You can get a 32 user version of Sybase SQL Anywhere for 2499 USD. That may seem like a lot, but it's really 1-2 weeks of a programmer's time. It would be pretty hard to write a VFP database server in 1-2 weeks. Even if you did, you'd end up spending a lot more on maintenance over the years.

If you need only very limited features on the back end, it might be worth writing your server with VFP. Otherwise, I think client/server will be cheaper, more reliable, and more versatile in the long run.