>> 3. DCOM. A VFP DCOM server can sit on the same machine as the VFP data. When called be a client program (VFP in your case), the DCOM server is on the same machine as the VFP data, so processing is not slowed down by transferring the data across the network
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>I'd like to know more about this as well. I had thought about COM but had no idea where to start.

Toni Feltman gave a great presentation on this at the Great Lakes Great Database Workshop back in November. I would send you her paper, but I am not sure if that is legal :-). Basically, you create an out-of-process server (a .exe), install it on the file server, then call it from the workstation with CREATEOBJECTEX (rather than CREATEOBJECT). Then all the processing takes place on the file server.