I experiended a problem like that, and after a lot of research, I found the following :

When you use buffermode 5 with VFP and Novell Servers, you must adjust the lock parameters in the server. Thats because VFP uses a "lock" mecanism to do its transaction process. If your aplication does a lot of editing, you have a lot of "locks".

The solution I got was : go to the server, load the "monitor" and select "Set parameters", option "Locks", change all the parameters,( I use 10000 per connection ). It will consume some server memory.

It seems that when this value is exceeded, the VFP waits for ever, without error messages.

I hope can help you.

Carlos.