All apps that I develop are written with the assumption that they will be run on a network with multi-user shared access to files. Thus, all tables are opened "shared", with a reprocess setting of 5 minutes. The only time that I use a table exclusive is in maintenance apps that need to do reindexing and packing, and in those I make sure that the table will never be used exclusively for more that 5 minutes. Thats also when I use FOPEN to make sure that the table can be opened exclusively.

This approach has saved me more times than I can count, because sooner or later all apps will probably be on a network in some form or another.

Hope this helps :)

-Rick