>Greetings George
>>
>>There's no code. VFP handles the process internally. Does the error handler return a message or code as to why the crash occurred?
>
>
>only error is "record out of range" - not even a hint of which of the 21 tables being opened is responsible...
>
>how are we supposed to troubleshoot with no code or even pointers to which table is causing problems?

It sounds like an indexing problem. You might try to open the tables and setting the index order manually to determine which table is the culprit. Once found, rebuild the index from scratch.