>Have form that is based on a view, buffermode is 1-Pessimistic. not understanding when exactly it sees the change made to the txtfields. have tried different things. The latest is comparing thisform.txtfield.value with oldval("field","table") in the lostfocus. It doesn't detect a change. What am I doing wrong?

From my experience oldval() will only tell you if another user has changed the disk version of your field while you were working on it, getfldstate will give you a string of 1's and 2's - the 2's being the fields that have changed..
It gets tricky with the table in buffering mode 5 , nothing will show up on disk until you do a tableupdate()
Lots of reading to do on cursorgetprop() and cursorsetprop() , tablerevert() and tableupdate() will also help.
HTH