Thanks to Gavin, who pointed out the most obvious cause of my 
problem (a - ahem! - bug in my program) I was forced to re-examine 
the code.  We use copylibs for all of the data base I/O and 
we have COBOL macros in the copylibs.  It appears that the 
item-level lock definition "value" data item was too small to 
hold the entire data item value.  So, while the lock was 
successful, it just didn't lock the value I was supplying, 
but rather the value it could hold (which BTW didn't exist 
in the data set, and in fact, there is and should not be any 
requirement for it to exist).

So, thanks everyone for the help, and boy, do I feel stupid.

Well, more so than usual! :-)

So much code, so little time.

Jim Phillips                            Manager of Information Systems
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