>I would appreciate hearing suggestions about the best (i.e., safest, highest performance, most bugfree) way of adding new records on a frequent, but one-at-a-time basis, to a shared table.
[...SNIP...]

I'm not sure about the diff. methods, better ask Arnon about these. However, I am familiar with views.

> I cannot find in the docs (or the books I have) when an insert event originating in a View actually passes through to the base table (except when explicitly instructed via TableUpdate). I'm not even sure if Views were meant to be used as a means to put new records into a base table.

Sure they are. Possible problems though may crop up when using sophisticated views (that is, views that perform SQL joins, for example).

>I have come across this unusual error message when I've tried to append a blank record to a view and then do a TableUpdate with the record still blank: something like "Cannot insert a blank record into a view's base table".

This only means that some constraint is acting upon the view's base table that won't allow blank records to be appended/inserted into it. A particular field may be defined as a primary key, for example, and as such can't accept .NULL. values. In this case you'd have to fill up the record first before calling TableUpdate().