> Only problem, and it is a biggie, IMO, is that you loose the
> related information stored in the DBC.


precisamundo Nancy -
converting to free tables would also clobber all my nice long
field names too, rendering the table useless.

with distributed systems such as this one, i shy away from
using permanent relationships, stored procedures, etc. because
the client machine can truly be considered a hostile environment
and if (when) something happens to the DBC or a DBF i usually have
to restore data as of the last synchronize as well as table
structures. use of transactions has gone a long way to avoid those
problems, however.