Craig:

Thanks for your response. I had hoped you might answer.

We have a DOS application written in Clipper that was started in dBase II, over 18 years ago. On Monday, I spent 6 hours chasing a syntax error while trying a TableUpdate() to save changes. It turns out that in 18 different tables a field name of DESC was used. In one of the offending tables the other field names were KEY and CODE. One of my co-workers realized that the underlying code that is in TableUpdate is something like

UPDATE POSCODES SET DESC = "my new text", KEY = 1, CODE = "abcde"

We know that we need to make changes to the Clipper code to make it reference a new field DESCRIPT and our installation process easily allows us to add the new field to users tables and to copy the contents of DESC to DESCRIPT. However, removing the DESC field requires a lot more work. We want to do as little DOS work as possible as we'd like to retire it at some point in the future.

In general, our view are select * ; . Unfortunately, I've been programming PC since 1984 when I had to conserve resources as much as possible. With Windows programming dynamically using memory, I know that I don't have to be as careful of memory as I once did, but as I understand computers, there is some performance penalty for us of any resource that you don't really need. Therefore, the reason I asked my questions.

Unfortunately, I've seen some real resource hog windows apps. Even with 64M RAM & UP and 10 - 20 gig HD's, it takes some amount of time to move the drive heads when the Window's memory manager swaps out memory to disk and vice versa.

TIA
Mike