>The OS is WinNT 4.0 SP4, not using any NOS at this point - all tables are kept on a local hard drive. This has happened before - I never tracked down the cause at the time because the programming project got canceled - but that's not going to happen this time! If I zap the table, manually APPEND DELIMITED, no problems. However, when running as a program, doing basically the same thing, it happens.

Have you run this through the debugger?