Tim,

good that you solved it!

But it reminds me of the worst bug (IMHO) that I experienced in FPW, and I thought I would take the opportunity to relate it here in case it still exists. . .

I had a table, provided to me, called 3CHAR, which was a table to de-code 3-char station names to their full names.
As is my custom, I coded the file name as the alias on the USE statement.
The program would work for a while after issuing this USE, accessing records and all, but later would fail trying to access the file. All USEes to "close" files were in the clean-up, so it was not being closed prematurely.

Turned out that FPW did *NOT* like the first character of an alias being a numeric. Never complained, but did seem to ignore it.

Don't know if this is still a problem in VFP (I just NEVER do it since that!).

Cheers,
Jim N

>>>I get an error when I say ?DATBASE->lastname. DATBASE='8finance' and refers to 8finance.dbf. This seems quite a valid statement to me.
>>>AAUGH!
>>> "DATBASE is not an object" is the message I get.
>>
>>? &datbase..lastname
>Ed, turns out I forgot to sele another workarea b4 I opened up the current one and thus losing the reference to Datbase.
>
>does &datbase..lastname = datbase->lastname?