Hi all,
After playing with this problem for a while we finally know the reason (almost).

We have six workstations Win2K Pro, VFP7 on a Novell LAN. Tables are located on the LAN, we are using standalone machines, each with a copy of VFP. Opening a table with a dialog box eg USE ?, opens a table as ReadOnly. Opening a table from the Command Window eg USE tablename, opens the file normally.

This problem did not occur on all machines. We discovered that changing from the Novell client to the Microsoft client made the problem go totally away. (!)
We're now looking to see if the NIC's are part of the problem, or possibly the positioning of the PC's on the LAN.

This, of course :( means that we cannot use the NPRINT command. We use this a lot in our business. If anyone is aware of a Novell client that doesn't exhibit this behavior or of a MicroSoft client that allows NPRINT and other fuctionality, please let me know.

TIA