>What have you heard about SP3???
>
>Craig

Ok Craig & Bret, Here's what I know...

Bear with me, I'm not an NT whiz so this might be long. I maintain a huge reporting system in FPW2.6. It fairly simple, no transaction processing & works on what I call my purge-and-dump theory. Big huge tables come in as text files, get dumped out on reports, then get purged for the next period. This manages 30+ tables from external source, 5 of which hold over 4 million records each. Plus a dozen internal tables to make reports look "pretty".

We run NT servers as our database servers and Win95 workstations. Everything worked fine but very slow on NT3.51. Upgraded to NT4.0 on my original database server and the whole system went kafluey for awhile. Slapped on SP2 and began seeing consistent types of errors with the prg's using the tables with millions of recs. Once adding the hot fixes life was well again albeit the old server was still too slow.

Replaced this old server recently with big mighty Pentium Pro that I have laid official rights too as exclusively for my app. This came loaded with NT4.0 and the same consistent errors with my big tables tripped me up again. Since getting the hot fixes with SP2 to load is such a hassle, my Network Administrator recommended bagging SP2 and loading the all new SP3 at the time. The result was enuff to drive me to drink after restoring endless corrupted tables and it gave me Win3.1 GPF flashbacks for a week. Needless to say my atitude wasnt very pretty towards the Network guy. We stripped the new server bare, reloaded NT4.0 with SP2 and the string of hot fixes and life was grand once more... Rox was happy :)

Before resorting to stripping the new Server down I played with running my 2.6 app under VFP5.0b to see if the errors went away on new server. No such luck, got different errors but still problems. Tried same thing on old Server with SP2 & hot fixes and it worked albeit abit ugly.

Also... just read very informative article on the pitfalls of SP3 during lunch this week. I'll dig around for it and add a note here for you to reference it yourselves before the day is over.