>I'm considering converting a rather large VFP7 app before it is even deployed but some threads I've read here about data corruption with VFP 8 have raised a red flag. Any experience with this problem?

I think care needs to be exercised when assessing "data corruption" problem count increases as regards VFP8 specifically.

In particular VFP8 now has some capability to detect and warn about potential data loss situations that did not exist in releases 5(?), 6 and 7 at least.
The most critical one to my mind is the raising of an error if there is an inconsistency between the 'logical file size' (calculated based on VFP RECCOUNT and RECSIZE) and the physical size.
This was known to be a serious loss-of-data cause for TRANSACTIONs (see MSKB #293638) and probably also caused lost records in non-TRANSACTION applications too.
VFP8 also will detect/prevent a table from exceeding 2GB, with appropriate warning. Not sure about FPT/CDX protection.

I have (yesterday) seen 1 report of increased FPT corruption RATE. That seems a bit scant to count as a trend.

All in all there may be good reason TO GO DIRECTLY TO VFP8, especially if you add the additional consideration of double-sized CDX files in VFP7SP1 that go away in VFP8.