>Hi
>
>We are using Visual FoxPro 6 sp4 on Windows 2000 and it keeps corrupting our forms when we save them or the forms we are working get corrupted when we close down. Has anybody else had this problem or know of a solution. We have sp1 on Windows 2000

This is a known issue with Win2K and VFP and the status of the Write Cache Enabled flag in Device Manager involving ATA/IDE disk drives - you need to disable the cache to prevent the problem, but Win2K reenables it on it's own each time it resets the system, so that going into the System Control Panel applet or the registry and resetting the affected flag doesn't 'take' on a permanent basis. It also impacts the drive's performance noticably, which is probably why the OS resets the status during the system startup.

I have one 100% reliable solution, and one that works if you remember to change the registry entry after every reboot. The 100% reliable solution is to use SCSI or IEEE 1394 Firewire hardware from Adaptec; the Adaptec drivers for Win2K respect the settings on a drive by drive basis. I've tested this on Adaptec's 78xx family drivers (single and multichannel SCSI HAs which are relatives of Adaptec's 2930/2940 family of SCSI controllers), their RAIDPort family drivers (common heritage with the A133 HA) and their on-motherboard Firewire chipset being used by Asus and Tyan currently, and all will respect the registry setting, although the drives and HAs may be managing their own deferred write caches. I've also used Mylex and QLogic HAs which behave correctly, but nowhere near as much detailed experience as I have with the Adaptec product - I use Adaptec 78xx and 79xx chipsets in all my own machines, equivalent to Adaptec's 294x family PCI HAs. I've not lost any .VCT or .SCT files on the SCSI drives, but I have scrambled .SCTs on more than one EIDE drive on the same software and basic motherboard.

The alternative is to go into Control Panel after each reset and manually remove the check mark from the box in Device manager, a PITA, or are extremely adventurous and want to write something to dink with the registry that runs as a service...

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>Thank you
>
>David Clark