>no special characters but it seems as though another app has the file open at the moment which prevents vfp from even getting in to see it. i've set excl off etc. but still can't access it at the same time. is this a standard problem?

Barry,

You didn't answer my question, what's the name of the file. If table is in use exclusively by another application you would get 'Access denied' error. Can you see this table if you issue "USE ?" comand in VFP? Did you chack attributes of the file?