Greetings FMGods.... Hope someone can give me a hand.

We built a FM5 database to track outgoing/incoming repairs and loaned equipment for our office. Our office consists of 2 Apple G3 Powermacs, 2 IBMThinkpads running Win98, and one more Thinkpad running Win2000. The database resides on a server running WinNT4.0

Recently, we began having trouble. It seems that the Win98 clients cannot open the database regularly. We aren't sure if it is just first thing in the morning (after an overnight backup ran) or if it's any time after the Win2K client has opened the database.

Our current work around is to open the database on one of our Macs and that seems to fix everything.

Has anyone experienced something similar? If so, can you advise us of a fix? We'd ideally like to be able to open the db on whatever client, whenever. We assumed this would work since all the machines have FM5 running.

I'm not sure baout the actual cause of the problem - not knowing any better I'd say its the Win 2000 that needs proper configuring.

However - I noticed in your post that you talked as if the files reside on one of the computers, that is not necessary has the files open, but instead, the first one that needs to use them actually opens them. Doing this, then end up hosting the files that reside on another machine.

Not a good idea. Your best bet is to open the files with Filemaker on the machine where the files reiside. Leave them open and runnigning under FM all the time and then connect as guest consistently on all the other machines.

We had a similar problem with a Win98 box, we did a new install with Win98 release 2 and a lot of our problems went away.

Also what software are you using to back the machines up with??