>Desperate times, desparate measures. Actually here in Canada, that's how we play hockey. (<bg>).
>
>Back to serious stuff - I have a command window built outside my app but accompanying it, so I did what you said by
>(1) opening dbc
>(2) remove table xxxx
>
>and that worked good. Then I opened the app so it could process the oSdtMeta.Update("ALL!ALL"). It worked sort of ok, but instead of reading the COREMETA for the free tables (VFXSYS in particular) and updating the user's copy of the VFXSYS table to match the COREMETA, it created a new VFXSYS in the Update directory. My client's VFXSYS table (located in the DATA directory) did not get the new fields and the empty VFXSYS file created in the Update directory was left in that directory, so the next time I ran the app, it updated the client's VFXSYS structure but lost all the data. (It seems it overwrote my clients file with the VFXSYS found in the Update directory (which it created).
>
>So, how do I prevent losing all my clients data in these free tables and still get the structures updated???

You do not provide the new, empty, tables to your customer. All you do is copy the new SDT tables and the 3 database files [DBC, DCX and DCT] into your customer's data folder. You also should open nothing in the Update folder. This is just a temporary location for the new SDT and database files. After they are copied to the production data folder, they should be deleted from the Update folder. Then just open the database and run the SDT Update method.