>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?

Aside from the ability to issue a RECALL to recover the record (you can seek it with SET DELETED OFF), I'd recommend using a surrogate primary key that's of use only for joining tables, and not for sequencing data, so that throwing away primary keys of discarded records won't matter.