>This notion of , a record is not really deleted until a “Pack” is strange to me and is causing me to reconsider some basic design philosophies. If the user deletes a record from a table that has a primary key, is there a way for that user to re-enter that record before a pack procedure? If not then how to VFP programmers get around this?

To add to what John said, I think you'll find that most people use a surrogate primary key. You add a field for the key, and it's value is a unique number. You can store the last used number in a separate table and each time a record is added, increment that last used number. This field would only be used internally in your app, the user would never see it.

hth