>>I've read warnings about using the PACK command to delete records.
>
>I have too, never heard about them actually happening though.

Two weeks ago I was at a client's site. They had a problem with a program not acting correctly and I traced it down to how a deleted record was being treated. So I figured that packing the file would be a good solution (the program is very old and FPDOS and being rewritten in VFP). The file is on an NT Server. I opened the file in FPWin2.6 and packed the file. I got an error that the file doesn't exist when I issued the use command to close it. Then FPWin got an internal consistency error and just disappeared. When I went to look at the file, the DBF simply disappeared and the CDX was still there. Beats me as to what happened. Of course I had the file backed up (after hearing the horror stories). So, I copied the files to my development machine and used VFP to pack the files then copied them back to the NT Server.

What happened, who knows. But now you've seen a horror story...and it could have been worse.