Unrelated to your problem, I would recomend to SET TABLEVALIDATE to 7. It'll prevent "file in use" error on a table open.

>SET TABLEVALIDATE is set to 3 and I am using VFP 8, so in the event of header corruption, I should get an error message when END TRANSACTION was issued but I didn't get it. I ran the sample code from mskb #293638 that did give an error message.
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>However I did pack and reindex the table in question, it now seems to accept records after END TRANSACTION.
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>Thanks for the pointers!