Hi All,

I have been talking over the past week to a guy who has been beating his brains out of table corruption - 'Not a Table'. No, it's not a simple matter of the record count in the header. On every occasion the problem is the a Hex 71 character appears at the front of the file, moving all the header offsets, and the start of the first record (at least) to the right. In addition, most of the nulls which appear in a normal header are changed to spaces.

The tables in his app are all free tables, are three or four tables become affected. There is no way to repair the tables, so it's a case of start again from known good tables, which can be verified as healthy.

The system ran virtually unchanged for 2 years, corrupted regularly for some weeks and than ran reliably for a few months, and has been failing on a regular basis since (several times a day). Running Windows 2000 Server, current level, with VFP6 SP5. He could load the entire app and its tables on a standalone notebook, and have it crash. But a new small network with four workstations from scratch, crashed after 2 hours. Always the same corruption.
Has checked everything -NICs, video cards, discs, etc, no luck.

Anyone seen this behaviour and can share the answer?

TIA

Geoff