This all seems a little too mysterious, even after reading all of the postings. Once again, I'm having an issue where clients see old data for long periods of time and am not sure where to go from here.

We run 3 instances (normally 3) of an in-process COM DLL in a custom "pool manager" application that our clients connect to with TCP over a LAN. We have over 130 sites with an average of 25 clients per site sharing the 3 instances. Occasionally, some of the sites will have a problem seeing old data - lots of old data. We may transfer an entire table by converting it to XML and the entire table could contain old data. We use VFP to access the base tables and voila, the new data is there. If we shut down the pool manager app and re-start with 3 new instances of our DLL, we get the new data. Again, not always, not everywhere. We can never re-produce it on any of our systems (of course).

Before I give the impression that it's only in COM servers or has something to do with the pool manager application we use, let me say that we see it in .EXE's and .APPs as well. A lot of the time we can re-produce the problem in that situation.

We've sprinkled various calls we've picked up from the UT and other places around and are able to fix it most of the time. What is up? Is the only solution to put SYS(1104), RLOCK()/FLOCK()/UNLOCK/GO RECNO() calls all over the place and hope for the best?

My clients are starting to tell me the product is unreliable and I'm having a hard time keeping up with patching every little place they find.

If I can't stop this once and for all, I may have no choice, but to move away from .DBFs and that's saying something!

Any help would be appreciated,
Mike