We've been having an intermittent recurring problem with general fields in a table and file locks in a multi-user environment. I'm hoping someone here might have come across something like this and can shed some light on it.

We have a vfp 6.0 sp3 app that users execute from a drive mapping on a Windows NT 4.0 server on the network with the data also on the network server. Clients are win9x machines with a couple of NT workstations thrown into the mix. We have a large table that contains word documents stored in general fields. We open these documents for editing in-place on a form in the application.

Ocassionally, if a user has one of these documents open, and another user is trying to append a new document via part of a view update that also affects 3 other tables, the update hangs because there is a file lock on the entire table that the word document that's being edited resides in, not just the record at the record level, but the entire table is file locked. You can look in Windows NT server applet under in-use and see that the file is locked by a user. This doesn't happen every time that a user is editing a document, just about approx 10% of the time a document is opened for editing.

tia for any information that could help us resolve this issue.

JE