I have made a breakthrough.

Up to today, I have been doing most of my testing under Win2000, (which is our prefered platform), I tried Win95 in the early days, but hadnt gone back to it. I realised I hadnt tried the turning off of the Windows disk caching on 95. When I did this my test program worked. I've now stripped back my test program to just use one FLUSH after the END TRANSACTION, and it gives results pretty close to my FPD version, with caching off under '95.

HOWEVER, under Win2000, although I turn off caching, (which is under the actual disk properties in Device Manager), it DOESNT stop Windows from caching the data, and I lose records no matter what I do. Although this may be the disk caching for the hardware itself, not the Windows caching. I cant find anywhere else that allows switching off of caching in Win2000.

Looking through the Microsoft KB, I've found a known bug which says that disk caching is always put back on when Win2000 starts up, no matter what you set it to. This isnt quite the same problem, but sounds close, so I've requested Microsoft email me the patch, which isn't on general release yet. I expect to get this next week, I'll let you know what the result is.

Many thanks for all your suggestions, I've certainly learnt a lot during all my tests.

Kind Regards

Malcolm Sheldon