>It's me again with yet another goofy one. The title says it all.
>
>Excel works fine, until I try to open a .DBF file. Everything was OK till we try to open a .DBF. We get a read-only error.
>We just installed novell client 4.83. Everything seemed fine till this came up.
>This problem does not occur if the .dbf is on a local drive.
>Any ideas would be appreciated.

uninstall the client - you have identified the problem as the Novell client.