Even on a WAN with a 1.6mb pipe, performance is still sluggish...

I think you are overlooking some serious limitations of DBF's with respect to distributed computing. On a LAN, sure, DBF's can work fine. However, the scaleability with size, having to maintiain indexes, integrated security, etc. can also creep in. Given it's relative costs, SQL-Server brings such a bang for the buck, why you would not use that for primary data storage, especially in distributed environments is beyond me...

>John,
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>>Over a WAN, I have found both opening and closing tables to be very slow...
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>My experience that this only the case when:
>- much of DELETED records exists at the beginning of the table.
>- The WAN was a dial-up connection.
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>Once the WAN is open opening tables sure is slower than on a LAN (it has to load buffers), but when you keep them open in your app, using it again is just as fast than on a LAN. Closing it is slow indeed when VFP has used writebuffers wich have to be flushed yet.
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>Walter,