I've been having a problem with a site recently where the "columns" file for a specific database with almost 20 000 entries seems to be corrupting itself on a daily basis.

Ultimately, there can be up to 15-18 people able to access it at once, but usually there's only 3-4 similtaneous accesses at most.

There's no btrieve in place, the users are accessing it via a drive letter mapped to a shared folder on a NT4SP6a server where "Everyone" has "Full Permissions".

So the burning question is, what the heck could be happening to make this dinky 80k file corrupt with alarming frequency, and thereby cause much grief for myself? Maximizier's web-based support is "backup, restore" which would be fine if this was a now-and-then problem, but it's happening all too often.

Thoughts, tips, criticisms?

Try disabling "Save Settings on Exit" on all workstations. If possible, enforce it via a network policy or login script. The registry value

HKCU\Software\Maximizer Technologies\Maximizer\StartUp\Save Workspace

should be zero (DWORD).

This often helps avoid corrupted User files (MXZU.MAX) on peer-to-peer networks, but the Columns and Macros file (MXZM.MAX) and Favorite Lists file (MXZS.MAX) can also get updated when Maximizer shuts down.