This happened a thousand miles away, so I have no way of testing anything. Just want to know possible reasons. Here goes:

I have an app freshly moved from VFP6 to VFP7 SP1. It has one long process of importing a truckload of data from a huge textfile, and then distributes the imported data into a dozen tables. The data are mostly repeats from the previous import (not incremental), and have maybe 20 new records in a thousand.

The whole operation has two parts: import from textfile into a temp cursor (built on-the-fly) and then analyzing this cursor record by record and writing into tables. The first part typically takes a few seconds (accompanied by a thermometer), and the second may take between twenty seconds and three minutes, depending on the machine. This has worked fine in previous versions, and the recent recompile has behaved just fine as well.

Now the user ran this on a XP box. She said she was getting messages saying that "Windows was unable to save all the data for the files {list of five dbf and their cdx files, given as UNC paths}. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.”. At the end all the data were there (as far as she could see), and when she quit the app she got a nasty log message, where the only useful parts were "szModName: hungapp" and the name of the executable.

I figured XP was checking the exe to see if it was stuck. Since it didn't get into the event loop (waiting for user input) for a while, it figured it got stuck and started closing its files, or something of the kind. I told her to rerun the whole thing on a box with a different OS, and it went just as smooth as always.

So this should be something about XP's settings. Can anyone figure out what was actually happening?