Has Anyone Heard of this One?
In a VFP application, I received a complaint from several customers that they could not find photos that were associated with some records (the photos are referred to by a lookup table that is related to a VFP table). Those photos are seperate JPGs that are stored in their own folder. Anyway, to make a long story short, the problem was that the file system refused to create any additional files in the folder...period. This was not application specific but OS wide. No additional files could be added to the existing folder (in this case the folder's name was PICTURES). Due to an application quirk, no error messages were displayed so this condition went on unnoticed until a 'situation' was declared.

Further investigation revealed that on most of the PCs that displayed this problem (there were a lot of them) the problem occurred when the number of files reached 32,767 (a short integer).

Yup..when you delete one file you can add one file, etc.

No disk problems were revealed by any utilities or was this problem bound to a specific BIOS (this occurred in desktops, laptops, in name brand PCs and clones).

So, after carefull evaluation I called Microsoft MSDN tech support.

They could not reproduce the problem...curious.

Knowing the speed at which the corporate wheels turn, I worked around the problem by changing the app to use a hierarchical file structure (admittedly, the way it should be but the FAT32 specifications explicitly state that there is no limit on the number of files in a subdirectory).

Alls well that ends well, but I'm sure this little nasty is lurking out there for the unexpected.

If you have any insight let me know.

Thanks,

ED