The entire scenario sounds like a 'bad idea'... personally, I would wash my hands of this, and walk away. FPW26 is more than 10 years old... there are too many variables in your equation that are making this destined for failure.

1) 10 year old technology accessed by current technology
2) Developer with no experience
3) Instructor with no experience

If they do run into problems, who are they going to call for help? You! I would speak up now and tell them that this is a bad idea, and that you do not reccommend doing it. Any savings they see getting up front will be lost in the end with maintenance, upkeep, possible data integrity problems, etc.

The student programmer has a sweet deal - he will get to gain experience, then leave in a few months and hand the app over to you to maintain.

-w-

>Hello Wayne,
>
>Thanks for the comments. Foxpro isn't an option I think - I've not been given a role in this, and they're employing a student programmer to build the application, supervised by somebody with no FPW/VFP experience - not exactly ideal!
>
>Another possibility might be to automate a regular export of the relevant data from FPW, and import it into Access rather than link.
>
>Is shared access by FPW/Access ODBC a really bad idea?
>
>Cheers
>
>John