hi Mark
i tried a similar thing.
use oldfile
copy structure to newfile
use newfile
append from oldfile
and then exported it via the vfp export facility to both foxbase and foxpro 2 type files, but it made no difference. when firing up the program that uses the dbf, it automatically rebuilds missing indexes (which i deleted to get it to reindex), but it still gets stuck trying to open this dbf file.

i also thought to eliminate any issues between vfp and clipper, i would manually create a new dbf in dBase3, use vfp to export the data to a delimited text file and then write a clipper routine to get the data back into the new dbf, but after i had typed in 128 of the 134 fields in the new dbf file, i remembered dBase3 has a limit of 128 fields! the reason for using dBase3 is that it seemed to me to be the lowest common denominator in this arena...

best - john