>>I am experiencing an intermittant problem creating or opening text files. FOPEN and FCREATE both will occationally return an empty string rather than a numeric file handle. If I exit VFP and restart it works fine. I am running VFP7 SP1 on Win2k Pro Build 5 SP4. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
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>Empty you mean -1 ?
>Check why you can't get the handle with ferror(). ie: Ferror() returns 5 for 'Access denied'. File might be open already, it might be included in porject and trying to get RW access etc.
>Cetin

Actually it is an empty string of about 10 char (I guess that should not be an empty string but a blank string) and not returning any errors. What is happening is that although the file handle is blank (not numeric) it does not return any errors on FGETS or FPUTS. It simply doesn't move any data around and although it creates a file cannot close the file as it hasn't a valid file handle. I am putting in some error trapping to check for this but would really like to figure out why this is happening and correct it if possible. This is just one step in a series of automated steps and having to stop and restart the process in the middle is less than appealing.

thanks jeff