Hi Elyse.

>I have a large VFP7 application used by many clients and quite often I come across bad indexes or, even worse, garbage in the data files. How do these garbage characters get into the data and how can I prevent that? I mostly use optimistic table buffering, and, when updating more than one table at a time, wrap the updates in a transaction.

Buffering and transactions should help prevent these kinds of problems most of the time, but there can be other reasons for corruption, including bad network interface cards, viruses, user shutting down without exiting app, server crashing, etc. We've had clients with the first two of these for example, and they can be ugly to track down. Good luck!

Doug