Hi Dorin,
SNIP
>
>All these problems are not necesarly VFP problems. When I was searching for possible causes of data corruption, I found that ANY application that use shared database acces has the same problems. A lot of links to OS patches, updates, drivers and a lot of links to KB articles that describe the buggy behaviour of network components (something like "It is not my app , is the OS" justifying). If everything could run as it is supposed to run, VFP will have few problems ( there will be always an user that think about RESET as the best solution to finish a long running query :-) ).
>I cannot believe that those network components cannot be made more reliable, I simply can't.

While I agree with you that MS (and manufacturers) need to pay more attention to data integrity when it comes to network components/network data handling, I think too that a MAIN cause of many (VFP) data integrity problems is the design of the Windows OS cacheing mechanism (more below).

>
>Your problem is related (I think) to VFP-to-OS-Network/disk cache thing. When SELECT, Foxpro will open tables using USE AGAIN mechanism and the OS doesn't flush new changes to disk when Foxpro request data (even it MUST do so)

It is pretty clear, from reading what I could find about how the Windows cache and redirector mechanisms work, that they are designed with 'documents' (i.e. larger files) and infrequent updates of whole files (i.e. save document) in mind and definitely NOT for frequent updates to individual parts of multiple different files (tables and CDXs and FPTs) in very fast sequences. I suspect that this has 'worked' adequately for us in the past because CPUs were slower and, probably more importantly, RAM was much smaller (forcing cache purges far more frequently than when a huge RAM is present).
I suppose, too, that MS itself has very little incentive to address the issues pertinent to VFP because it is the only MS product (that I can think of) that performs its work in this particular way. Any other MS product seems to write/update WHOLE FILES to do its work or relies on SERVER design (i.e. all relevant caching is done on the server machine and outboard applications are 'forced' to obtain refreshed data themselves from the server).
But even in this situation I would hope that MS does have some inentive to address this issue.
MS has long been promoting the expansion of PC usage and have designed things like peer-to-peer and simplified network (LAN) setup and Windows Update and many other things to assist this objective. And I believe that MS has been very successful in this regard to the point where we now have barely computer-literate users employing sophisticated applications.
These are the types of users who probably don't even realize that under the START button is a "Turn computer off" (or ShutDown) button. These are the types of users who might be tempted to unplug/replug the network connection to try to 'wake up' an apparently dead computer. These are the types of users who might think nothing of switching between users with applications still up and running for the current user.
MS **needs** to address these eventualities in order to protect a system's integrity and, to date, they have done far too little in this regard.

cheers