Fred,
I'll test this later tonight, it was broke and I reported the bug in VFP5, it was confirmed, it was fixed in VFP6 at one point, it looks like it may be broke again.
>Are you sure it's fixed in VFP6/SP3? I just tried a loop that replaces the contents of a memo field 1000 times:
>
>FOR x=1 TO 1000
> REPLACE memfield WITH REPLICATE('x',100)+STR(x)
>ENDFOR
>
>
>There was still substantial bloat that required pack memo to remove. The size of the file didn't change until I closed the table and then re-USEd it.