>i am in the process of locking down my app for distribution and am looking at ways to stop people opening the database or tables external to my program, but am uncertain of how to approach it.\
>Any ideas?


With VFP7 You could employ Database-events to control opening of tables. Another Idea is
to encode (cipher) the tables or use hardware-locks.

You could rename the extension so that it is not too obvious You are using DBF's. And finally
you could open the tables low level (fopen()...) and modify some bytes of the header so
that other applications are not able to open it as a dbf.