>I think you're missing nothing. If you could use exclusive then pack/pack memo.
>AFAIK how memo works you don't have a way of saying 'recyle' memo block (header keeps 'next free block' and for performance reason data is not checked if there are unused block numbers and if it could fit into one of them).
>Hope someone has a trick.

I think this issue should be addressed to Microsoft. It is kind of irritating. I did a test locally by create a small table with two fields. One of them is a memo field. I put one paragraph in each of the record. I have two records. That gave me a file size of 2k. Then, I blank the first one. No change in the file size. Then, I added 10k of data in the blank record. It moves the file size to 12k. Then, I blank it again. No change in the file size. I change the memo value to "test". No change in the file size. So, right now, I have only one character in each record but the file size is over 15k. This creates overload of disk space for nothing. For example, I have a large process which is constantly cleanup things. Instead of just having my regular 15 mb file size, it keeps increasing by 20 mb per day and I don't have much more data every day.