John,
I had a similar problem like what you described with index files.
Thru various painstaking tests, we managed to fix the problem.
In our case, we had "deleted()" as one of the index tag on our CDX file. Our app runs under "set deleted on" environment.
Somehow, under this combination, records do not appear to refresh correctly when tables are viewed from other PCs. We fixed it by switching the index tag of each file to ".NOT. Deleted()".
HTH
Yau