a puzzler

[Robert Haussmann]

Here's an interesting issue that came up today that had me 
stumped for more time than I care to admit to. But the ultimate 
cause was too interesting not to pass on.

Environment is 5.0.13 Native Windows, but I'm willing to
bet this doesn't matter.  You would probably see the 
same effect in any version/platform, going *way* back.

We have a *very* complicated screen in one application,
that has a large number of fields.  We got a request to
add a field (that already existed in the map) to the
upper left corner of the screen.  No processing or anything
else required.  A two minute job, right?

Edited the screen added the field in the upper left 
section and told the user to check it out.  They looked
at it and were satisfied.  Thought the issue was closed.

Started getting reports that data entered into the field
was not "saving".  Users claimed they would update the
screen, change info in the field, <ESC> to save and the
the info would vanish.  Of course we suspected user error
at first, but after seeing it outselves, found it to be true.
It didn't matter what you changed the value to, it always
resorted back to the original value.

Double and triple checked the field #, and it was right.
Looked for @WEF, @WLF or other processing that might change
the field, didn't find any.  Finally ran rclerk without 
any input or auto processing and it *still* would revert
back to the original value.  We suspected file damage, 
restored from backups, even made a test copy, wiped out all
of the records and created a new one.  Same effect--you 
could never change the field to be anything but blank (because
this was now a new record).

Edit type was (2,*), so nothing strange going on there.

Before I give the answer...anybody have a guess as to what
the "problem" turned out to be?  (I'm crossing my fingers 
that this isn't *completely* obvious--we've been using fP 
since 1987 and I had never seen this before).  Hint--it is
filePro specific, nothing hardware related like a faulty 
keyboard or anything like that.

Bob Haussmann
Tabor Children's Services, Inc.