>You do gain something with TABLEVALIDATE set to 0 or 2, just not at USE time. Later, on any attempt to write a (new?) record while the length/count discrepancy exists, an error message WILL be emitted.

I was talking only about USE command. If TABLEVALIDATE set to 0, VFP8 performs some additional validation during END TRANSACTION to make sure that appends are not lost, but it is not really a header validation.

Thanks,
Aleksey Tsingauz.