<snip>On a side note, have you ever heard of tables/container being corrupted that VALIDATE DATAB didn't show??

AFAIK Validate only checks the Database structures and indexes, not the actual contents of the DBF's or CDX's themselves.

If you had PACKed all the files, the PACK may have errored out on the corruption, i.e. the old zero size CDX's after pack problem.