>The trouble with NT is that it never gave us a chance to choose the default system codepage, and searching through the system help and some NT bible on the codepage issue led me nowhere - it's even more cryptic and misleading than Office help. I really don't dare messing with NT registry - it's the server for the whole company, and the app is a wee phonebook and workorder log, installed there for the convenience of our secretary, so the app itself is not so important.
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>Still, I feel I'll have more of this problem as more NT machines will come my way: how do you get VFP apps to display localized character sets on a NT (SBS in my case) machine?

Have you tried using the Regional Settings Applet from Control Panel? I'd assume that the behavior of VFP's runtime uses the setting controlled from there as long as you issue SET SYSFORMATS ON. The locale stuff is user-specific, and the settings selected for one user should have no effect on the file system as shared, or on Services which don't run in the context of the currently logged-in user. Just make sure that the secretary isn't logging in as Administrator to access her phone book...

Under NT, the related registry settings are scoped to the logged-in user, and the locale-specific settings that get frobbed with are under HKEY_USERS\SID (the value in use for the current HKEY_CURRENT_USER) so it should be marginally harmless and easy to fix if the value has negative effects.

The VFP6 docs imply that if SYSFORMATS has been set to ON in the default datasession, the subsequently-created datasessions inherit the ON value, and there's a specific reference to putting the line:

SYSFORMATS = ON

in CONFIG.FPW; the codepage isn't one of the SET values referenced in the doc, but it seems worth a try at least.