Thank you both for your responses. I am using RLOCK() simply because an external program is also updating (or inserting) deals in my main file. The external program recognizes a Locked record. I'm not sure what it would do with a buffered record, but I have no choice except to use what I was told to lock it.

I think that I've discovered the problem though. The file is buffered and the user's are encountering the RLOCK problem when they are adding new deals. I was trying to lock a record with -1 as the record number. I have changed the program to append blank, gather, TABLEUPDATE(.T.), then RLOCK(). This is yet to be tested, but I feel like that was my problem all along, I didn't have a tableupdate after the append and gather.

Thank you both for responding to my original message.