Hi Susan,

In the 'Receivables' part of the integrity check you posted, there were a good number of 'File Integrity' errors. These are more serious than the 'Application' errors that were being reported for OE. File Inegrity errors are typically bad index files or damaged data, not just that numbers or values are wrong. If different data was removed from the file that what was intended, rebuilding the integrity error would in effect delete that record. In short, when customers are being deleted, different information is being removed from the data than what you told it to.

Sometimes this situation is network related, such as opportunistic locking or file caching enabled through Windows or Novell. In a multi-user situation, workstations hold their own copy of the data and there are problems writing back. This is typical of any computer program that allows multiple people to access the same data at the same time - file caching and opportunistic locking should be disabled from all workstations. If you are using a Novell network, check the workstation Clients and Advanced settings.

When you delete a customer, can you verify that indeed that customer number was removed, or another unexpected one? The best way to tell is after you delete, close the Edit Customers window and then re-open it to refresh the grid. If you can still find that customer code in the list, then a different customer was actualy deleted.

Are customers being deleted from a single particular workstation, or from many different stations?

Are any of the customers that you desired to delete being deleted? Or are all the missing customers those that shouldn't have been?

These problems are not occurring because you are deleting customers at the 'wrong' time. There is something wrong in the system when deleting a customer from the data file. I appreciate that this must be very frustrating for you.

I would suggest that in DataCare, you disable the automatic repairing of Receivables integrity errors for now. This could be deleting customers from the files that are not meant to have been, due to the damage in the files. This might help prevent the other problems in OE, such as deleting valid ship-to addresses. If you still get OE errors and removed ship-to addresses, then the 'damage' has been done in AR by deleting a customer, before the check in DataCare has ever been done.

You might also want to set the customer you wish to delete as Inactive, and maybe change the name to something like 'Do Not Use'. So that as the problem is determined, these customers aren't accidentally used.