>It's the situation where a DBF is opened but its CDX is not and no error message is returned that makes me think of file handles. I've seen this kind of behavior before. My experience is that when there are physical network problems you get some kind of error message from either FoxPro or your network client.

We've had things like this back in 1991, and narrowed it down to low settings on the share.exe - in fact, our network called it automatically if it wasn't loaded (and it wasn't) and ran it with some low default values. When we tried to run an additional report while having lots of tables and indexes (.idx, back then) open, it actually broke and complained on "system resources exhausted".

In Barbara's case, this (or an equivalent) of this may not be the case, if it happens so random. Having all the available handles used up should prevent it from opening any file beyond that point; maybe the server is creating new handle space on the fly, but not quick enough to open the .cdx, yet sufficiently quick to open the next .dbf?

Barbara, we seem to have lots of maybies here.