>It just made sense to have elastic fields, why did they make them if they are not reliable?

Good question chris, but they have BEEN unreliable for other than relative static (foxhelp, foxuser) since they were first introduced. They are easily corrupted, and not that easy to work with in a program. i have usually taken the approach of allowing the user to creat a separate text file (control of filename is user or automatic), and invoking either a simple edit session or a modi file from the program....