>Just to let other people know in case they have the same problems as i have had, the issue ended up being a corrupt .cdx file. i just replaced it with a new one and the database validated correctly and the table could be opened. thanks for the help though :)

That all sounds real typical, Jordan. Now, the question is: why the corrupted cdx? If it occurs quite often, it may be hardware-related, in my experience. If it's very scarce, then it's not much to worry about. I regard very occasional bad indexes as one of the least-bad DB problems, in general, and they can occur in any DB product (though tools like vfp or Access are more vulnerable than, say, MS SQL Server or Oracle or DB2).

Actually the worst kind of index problems are the ones that don't manifest with an error right away, but simply give bad results! (these usually give error messages after a time, though). But the above are all good reasons to a) use 3rd-party tools, and/or b), re-index relatively often.