Try it and see, because on my SP1 copy of VFP7, I did what you listed below witht he SET DEFA and SET PATH, and I was able to open tables along the path both with and without the leading backslash. The only difference I had was that my drive letters are P: and H:. My P: drive does not contain any of my DBFs, there are on the H: drive, so I set the default to P: and the path to H: and was able to access tables both ways.
The only thing that comes to mind is the way the Netware drives are mapped. If, for example, H: is mapped to SYS:HOME and NOT a MAP ROOT, H:\myapp\mytable.dbf is NOT the same thing as H:myapp\mytable.dbf (you can check that from a command prompt). One references a path relative tot he root of the SYS volume, and one references a path relative to the HOME directory on the SYS volume.

Randy

>I take that back...I was reading another thread and found out that my version 7.00.0000.9262 does not have the service pack installed. I am going to install it and try to re-create the problem.
>
>>Yes, I'm in a large network. F: & H: drives are both Netware and I: is an NT server. When I purchased VFP 7.0, Service Pack 1 was already out so I installed it right away. I'm not sure if this was happening before SP1.
>>
>>But, I must have not explained the problem correctly.
>>
>>If I just set the default drive like you did everything works fine. I can open any table in the default drive with or without the backslash. It's when I set the default drive to [I:] and then set the path to [H:] and try to use a table on [H:] that I get an error.
>>
>>SET DEFA TO 'I:'
>>SET PATH TO 'H:'
>>USE \SUBDIR\MYTABLE {DOESN'T WORK}
>>USE SUBDIR\MYTABLE {WORKS}
>>