Hi Larry

Well, I think it's working! Needed a bit of reassurance, I guess.

Learnt not to hang a system waiting for a user a long time ago.
Once the user wants to post, I then switch to pessimistic, update and reset to optimistic. You had a good point, though - I was wondering whether going into edit mode should generate locks, and I guess they should not. I am only using the scenario I describerd for the serious accounting type updates. For more general updates, the small risk of occasional inconsistencies is not as great a concern, and I let VMP and VFP handle it in a pretty standard manner.

Perhaps the way it should be implemented in a framework is to warn the user if the base data has changed, with an option to force the changes, or lose them, refresh from the base data and maybe lock the records while the new changes take place.

My pessimistic updating generally does not involve bound textboxes - I found that tended to confuse the issue.

Geoff