Hi Paul

>>This is probably the most common type of response that we see and are what we refer to as the "I am getting paid to do this but I expect you to tell me, for free, how I can make money and not give you anything back". We usually reply to such demands by sending copies of our consulting rates :) (For some reason we never hear anything more from those people).
>
>Ha! So true (unfortunately)...

Well I am not so sure about the 'unfortunately'. There is a reason why we tend to adopt this approach nowadays:

I got an E-Mail (within the past 12 months) from someone asking me to investigate why their implementation of table buffering in a form did not work. They enclosed a zipped copy of their application (3.5Mb!) too. I responded, as usual, by suggesting that they post a question on any one of three forums (the UT, Compuserve or Virtual FoxPro User Group) and gave the URL for all three (pointing out that not only would they get the benefit of advice from others, but that the problem may already be known to someone else).

The response that they "were sure" it would not take me long to figure out what was wrong. I responded that unfortunately I did not have time to do that and agains suggested that the person post a question and include the code that wasn't working.

The next message said: "It has probably taken you longer to reply to me that it would have done to solve the problem and tell me how to do it. Why won't you take a look at this?".

Which is the point at which I stopped replying.

So sometimes I am glad we don't hear back from these people :)