To add to Ken's reply, the VFP Manual transactions connection property seems to cause the IMPLICIT_TRANSACTION property of the SQL Server connection to get set. Sending certain commands (including but not limited to SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE) causes a transaction to be automatically started.

You'll probably want to enable the manual transactions right before you issue a TABLEUPDATE on the view. SQL Server's default behavior is to hold exclusive locks until the end of a transaction, so prolonging a transaction will really hurt your concurrency.

-Mike