Craig,
Thanks for your help. I am using buffering and transactions and we do a flush after each table update. My thinking is that even with all that, each individual PC is what is actually writing to the file on the server. We definitly see more problems where the company has PCs that they "got at a great price but lock up a lot." Unfortunatly, we have little control over the hardware. We only sell the management software. Across 40 customers we have only a few that seem to have problems. Mostly with data that does not get written such as a child table updated but the parent was not. We never seem to have a problem with our "System" table which holds the next key values and we don't use buffering on it. It gets as many updates as all the others combined.

We do not use views but do quite a bit of work using Select SQL into cursors, user edits cursor and then write the data back from the cursor and the transaction, table update stuff.
We also have seen more problems with Novell servers as time goes by especally with newer ones. A 4 year old Novell server works great. A new one is nothing but problems.

Thanks again,
John


>I don't think COM or a free/cheap server database is the solution. Read the VFP documentation on views and buffering. Stop writing directly to the tables and most of your problems will go away.