Walter,

Thanks for your reply.

I use VFP 5 with no service pack. All of the worstation are using Win98 or
Win95. The Server is running NT 4 with SP3.

I already use Buffering and never open the exclusively during normal operation.

Do you have any suggestion for a good 3rd party tools that can automatically detect and fixes the corrupted file (DBF, FPT and CDX)

Thanks
Tony

>I've been running a FPW 2.6 application and have not encountered a corrupted index in about 1.5 years.
>
>In my VFP 6.0 applications i've NEVER encountered (not that i know off) a corrupted index.
>
>Two things to avoid corrupted indexes:
>Try to open files in exclusive mode as less as possible. Exclusive access to files more often lead to corrupted indexes than shared access. If tables are opened by more than one workstation, corruption of indexes are less lightly to occur.
>
>The reason behind this is that if one of these two rules are not met, the workstation holds a writebuffer at the client site. If something goes wrong when (or between) writing the buffers to the network/disk, the chances are that you'll end up with corrupted indexes and/or tables.
>
>In VFP use buffering to write your changes to the table and use transactions to make it all-or-nothing. Theoreticly this would not prevent corruption when writing buffers to the network/disk. But when talking about personal experience, this seems to be quite effective
>
>Other questions:
>- Are you by any chance using a Novell network.
>- I'm aware that on a NT 4.0 server adding a registry key (I forgot the exact name, should be called something like ChacheOpenLimit ? helps to prevent some problems, it should on the technet CD somewhere can anybody help me out here ?)
>
>Which version of VFP do you use ? Which service pack ?
>
>Walter,
>