Hi Mark,

About 3 eons ago (ok, not really, but definitely towards the end of the 20th century), one strategy recommended for dbf's was to keep the tables closed until you needed something from them.

This may involve a major rewrite of parts of your system, but you may want to consider the possibility of only opening your tables when you need to access them and close them immediately.

For example, if they need to edit data, open the table, bring the record into memory, close the table, allow the user to edit, open the table, write the data, close the table.

That way the possibility of the kids or a power outage shutting down the machine at critical time would be minimized.

By today's standards, this may seem as an antiquated approach, but if it works and solves your problem, you should consider it.

Have fun!

Alex


>We have an application used by people on their home computers and we are having lots of problems with corrupt DBFs, because they constantly turn off their computers, have power outages, kids turn off the machine, etc. No amount of "training" has helped. So, we're wondering does MSDE have corruption problems like DBFs? Would MSDE be more stable in such an environment?