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Are you saying that the fids really need to be contiguous (from 0x100) as the database file has to include the space for EVERY FID, whether it exists or not?

Yes. They don't have to be completely contiguous, but they need to be a lot less sparse than yours. The space taken up by a completely unused FID is only one byte, but if you've got several million unused FIDs that means you're still in trouble.

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Are the problems with discontiguous fid ranges limited to the database?

Yes. For instance, the Rio Karma, which has a rather smarter database, doesn't suffer from this problem.

Peter