>2. I noticed that linking a word file of 24K bytes caused my .ftp to increase in size by about 53K. Ouch! Any clues as to what might be going on here?

There is a bunch of OLE stuff that gets stuck in the memo along with the contents of the file.

FWIW, IMO, general fields are pretty useless in all but a few cases- there is no way to get the content back out of the field and into a file. A better strategy IMO is to store a pth to a file on disk, and use that to navigate your app to that file.

>3. I noticed that clearing a general field did not reduce the size of the .ftp file. Apparently the data is deleted but not expunged.

Yeah, that's the nature of memos.

>Is there a means for effectively 'packing' .ftp files after links or embededed files are cleared?

PACK MEMO, but you have to have the table opened exclusively. This is another reason to consider storing your stuff in files...