>But UNLOCK after a REPLACE had a major impact! ANd I'm told that adding =RECCOUNT() is also helpful, but I have a broken NT that is ahead of this in the task list!

I've always used:

REPLACE SomeField with SomeField

before doing a read and that forces the latest data from disk to come up. The data is always written right away, so the client is the problem and the REPLACE here handles this fairly well - I haven't had any problems with my Web Connection session files on some apps that are running in excess of 50,000 hits an hour...