I have not used it in several years, but Lantastic was a peer-to-peer networking gizmo that worked well for me in situations like this, plus it's cheap to buy. You might want to check into it.

>I am writing a small multi-user app (VFP) - starting with 2 workstations - then moving to 3 or 4 (max). I was planning on running this app on a peer-to-peer network - at least until I thumbed through some threads here on the UT.
>
>Some of these threads go back a while. Does anyone have any recent
>experience with peer-to-peer (Win98 2nd Edition or NT Workstation 4.0?).
>
>My major concern here is data corruption. I plan to battery backup
>all of the peers and am willing to put NT (W2K?) on each if necessary.
>Each client will run its own copy of the app, write its work files
>locally ... The "server" peer will be a new one (PIII-500 or better)
>and will only share the data files. What I'd like to avoid is
>(at least initially) maintaining a dedicated server box for 2 clients.
>I don't ever see this app expanding beyond 3-4 clients (this is
>my wife's business and we don't want it to get any bigger than that).
>
>NT Workstation would obviously be more stable and I presume would provide some protection against killing the network if, for instance, VFP or Word locks up. Is its peer networking also more robust than Win98?
>
>Appreciate any insight. I'd like to proceed with this project, but want to pin down some costs first.