Jack, I'm not trying to flame you, really, but look at your specific problem. Jim Nelson worded it well that if you're still running an ancient xBASE app it must be doing some things right.

I understand your concern with the lack of apparent attention to VFP in the media. I don't quite understand it, but look at the amount of time these guys spend on articles about SAP/R3 for instance. Most people I know have never even seen SAP. The trade pubs are notoriously faddish in what they cover; very much like teen fashion mags ;-)

Regarding JET being similar to the VFP engine, that's only so much wishy-washy MS b*llsh*t. JET has a far lower max concurrent user count, JET can't do true record locking, etc etc. Just because they say it don't make it true.

How many users will your system have? How high a hit count per hour? What is the topology? Give me these answers and let's discuss an architecture that would work and it might be VB and it might be VFP and it might be SQL Server and it might be all three.