>Someone suggested that opening tables at one time with the NOUPDATE clause could actually speed up processes with that table because no buffering was needed. Is that still true in VFP 6.0 and 7.0?

That was me, but the buffering was not the main reason. The reason would rather be the network OS, since it wouldn't have the overhead of applying locks to these files. Now with current networks it may not really work that way - NT may have its own reasons for doing things the way it does them - so you may simply do some testing and see. The test I have in mind would be most probably the reporting, where you may want to manually open the tables involved in an SQL select, and see if there's any difference if they are open with NoUpdate.