>Bruce,
>
>About the only other approach I'd think to suggest would be to close and reopen the tables.

Yes, I mentioned that as my last resort...it will certainly work, but has interface and performance issues.

>
>As others have noted FoxPro buffers its data and the FLUSH command, well, flushes *g* those buffers to disk. Again, as also noted, there is the intervening hardware/network issue though if the the data has been purged from the local machine to the server then the only issues to keep the data from being correctly saved would be a network failure, server failure or someone at the server unexpectedly shuts it down.

The question about FLUSH is, what is meant by "flushing to disk"? It may just mean the local copies in my theory, which is pretty much the same thing Tableupdate apparently does.

What I'll probably end up doing is opening SHAREd for most editing work, and the one heavy data-processing section of the process where EXCL is required, do a separate close, open EXCL , process, reclose, and reopen SHARED afterward. It will require a little interface work, but is the easiest way to resolve it I can see...