Wow, seems like a lot of trouble for such a small problem. I'm baffled here. I tried the copy to commands and they worked fine for me. I am on Win 2k PRO with vfp7 sp1.

I executed
COPY FILE 'c:\date.txt' TO ;
'c:\documents and settings\stysinger\desktop\date.txt'


with no problems at all
works fine in the other direction too.
I looked back in one of my older apps, and it worked for me in vfp6 also?
Interesting dilema.