Neil,
I tried even a closing and reopening the tables but it still did not work!
The problem will occur so long as the tables used has an active session somewhere else even when its not in the current form that was opened preceding this form.

Downloaded a copy of VFP9 Beta and found some interesting reading on new features that may shed some light on the topic at hand. 2 of the interesting ones :-
1) Flush - the new flush will actually flush records to harddisk (Hooray!)
2) set refresh - has a new value for the first parameter -1. It denotes reads will always be from disk. (Hooray again!)

Yau