I would appreciate any ideas regarding the following mysterious problem:

I have inherited a VFP application that interacts with a FOX DOS application. It saves its data by stuffing it in the memo fields of the FOX DOS tables. It stores multiple 'fields' in one memo by using XML-like tags.

Intermittantly users will get the following: They save data to the DOS memo fields, then return to find it has disappeared completely. This happens about 2-3 times a month, under fairly heavy use. Sometimes the pointer of the memo field in question seems to be corrupt (i.e. pointing somewhere past the end of the .fpt file) but not always. I haven't been able to reproduce the problem or even identify any pattern to the occurances.

Another intermittant problem: The dreaded C0000005 error comes up now and then, again without any clear pattern to it. I did take care to make sure all objects are cleaned-up properly, but this didn't seem to help.

The user workstations are Windows 98, accessing the .exe and data over a LAN, using the Microsoft client.


Do you think that concurrent access by FOX DOS and VFP to the same table and memo could be a root cause of these problems, or should I look elsewhere?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.