Hi Larry

Thanks for your very helpful comments. I would like to pursue this and gain some futher insights.

I was preoccupied with the message that triggered my reply to you. When I switch the buffering from 5, I actually switch it to 4, since in a few places a record is updated more than once, and I believe that the second update might be affected with buffering set to 3.

My asumption was that changing the buffering to 4 would refresh the current record and lock it, but to be sure, I do a another seek on it. Since I am updating up to sometimes 10 records (parents, children and other relatives), the update processes are fired in a separate routine to follow in an unbroken sequence. I should say that I am using VMP4 with VFP6, and am relying on the saveaction on the forms to trigger the tableupdate(). I call it programmatically. Since VMP uses bufering = 5, it seemed nother good reason to use 4 for the pessimisting buffering.

I am relying on the buffering switching/reseeking to ensure that the record updated is the correct current version at the time of the update. Before I migrated to Fox, I always used a read with lock on records to be updated, and I am trying to achieve this with VFP.

Does this make sense?

Thanks again

Geoff