James,

I see you already have a solution that seems to work for you, but is it possible that your temp folder is a hidden directory? If so, you can copy a table to a hidden directory, use that table, yet file(), directory(), and "alter table" and some other file functions do not seem to be able to see the file in a hidden folder. At least that is the case in VFP6 SP5.

Check the attributes of the temp folder. If it is a hidden folder, unhide it temporarily and retry your alter table command and it should work.

HTH