>I have an office of 7 computers...it is now using win 98...as file sharing...should I be able to write vfp applications...where all the computers can use my applications...with shared data...without going to winnt...and sql-server...?

You can certainly write VFP applications hand have them access data files on a peer station; realize that performance is going to suffer at some point if you have people doing things on the machine that's serving up the files to others - either you'll have noticable degradation of the VFP apps running on other stations when someone does something on the peer hosting the shared files, or you're likely to see uneven performance of applications run from the peer.

There's nothing forcing you to use NT as a server, or to use a database back end for a small LAN. There are obvious advantages to a dedicated file server. the most obvious one is that if someone does something on the station that's hosting the files and forces a reboot, or the system locks for some unknown reason, any files open on the network are likely to get trashed. You lessen the likelihood of a problem by not running anything on the machine hosting the files, whether the machine is running Win98 or WinNT. NT offers advantages in terms of security, file system integrity and scalability that aren't available for Win98; NT Server can have fault-tolerant disk configurations (RAID 1 - mirrored disks and RAID 5 - striped sets with parity are both supported directly by NT Server, and are not generally available for Win98 without specialized hardware. NTFS is less prone to certain types of file corruption than FAT, and performs better with non-=sequential I/O. It also does more to try to prevent the worst effect of fragmentation - defragmentation is still needed for NTFS volumes, but NTFS degrades with fragmentation in a more gentle fashion because of how the lists of blocks owned by a file are maintained.

There's no demand that you go to a backend database; I've run typical VFP applications with far more than 7 simultaneous stations accessing data from a file server. A backend offers advantages in terms of LAN traffic, but bandwidth issues are not likely to be the most pressing performance problem you note on a LAN. With a 56Kbit WAN connection, bandwidth is a more crucila resource. qa backend may also improve data integrity, but again, to get the full benefit of a backend like SQL Server, you need a machine that';s capable of running it.