>I'd like to be able to alter the properties of a free table I'm creating programatically. I want to hide it and make it read only. I also want to be able to change the read only attribute when I want to append records to it and them change it back again after appending. Can anyone suggest a way of simple doing this please.

And let's not leave the Windows Script Host out either:

oFSO = CREATEOBJECT("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
oFile = oFSO.GetFile(lcfile)
oFile.Attributes = BITOR(oFile.Attributes, 1) && Make it read-only
oFile.Attributes = BITXOR(oFile.Attributes, 1) && Back to read/write