Robert,

you may well have come across those situations, but I argue with your proposal to use MSDE instead.

While I can't speak from experience regarding a busy peer-to-peer system, you mention yorself 5 connections or less for MSDE.
In a non peer-to-peer situation I have seen FP do nicely with approx. 300 users simputaneously. I have seen VFP do fine with near 100 simultaneous users.
Surely peer-to-peer doesn't get dramatically slow at 5-15 users, does it?

I note that W2K is in the question. There have been a few threads about similar problems. I seem to remember virus-scanning software as being the main culprit and network cards being a possibility too. There may have been other stuff.

By the way, MSDE is now in the VFP7 package too.

JimN

>Yes to both.
>I was able to get better performance by running the executable and other files locally on each computer and putting the data on the server machine. Then path to the data. VFP, like any other file system database, will slow down with multiple users. If the performance is too slow to be acceptable, consider using the MSDE. It has all the performance of SQL Server for a small group of 5 connections or less and can be directly ported to SQL Server, when necessary, without a single line of code changing. Best of all, its free on the MS Office CD and several other Microsoft products as well as available for download off MSDN.
>
>HTH,
>
>Robert