>If using a free table I turn on optimistic table buffering and append blank what happens at that point to the table header? I am asking because I want to know if using buffering makes the table more prone to data corruption. Most of my users are on low end peer to peer networks and I seem to be experiencing much more data corruption since moving to VFP.

I use the DBC and optimistic buffering with out any problems and I have a lot of clients with peer - peer environments. My clients in a peer - peer environment also have a UPS on every machine. I have seen without the ups data corruption. I use a free table mainly to set up the data path and this free table sets on each computer.