>OOPs, you answered too fast. I made a mistake.
>All records were intact, just scrambled. I can read some of the fields it's just that the incorrect data is there.
>As for why? Good question. Not my laptop but a client's about 7 years old
>with 64 Meg ram. It's never locked up before in my program. I'll have to investigate. The program is very slowww on that laptop and the user is impatient. It may not have locked at all but that's the explanation I got.

I would say that there is a good chance that the laptop's HD has a problem (it is 7 years old).
Most likely a problem with bad sectors, as that would explain how updates are good but new data is not.

I notice too that you do not check the result of TABLEUPDATE(). It would be exactly this kind of condition that would (well, should) be caught and reported IF you checked.

You don't mention the OS of the system, or if it is part of a network. From your later messages I'd guess that it is an older OS running the application standalone.
It may still be worth checking if you can turn off HD write caching. ControlPanel>System>Hardware>DeviceManager (or close) then d-click on the HD icon and check the page tabs to see if one has a check-box for Write Cache. If so, make sure write cache is DISABLED.

good luck