Long story short: accounting was using fmp5 which they had control of.
Auditors said "No, IT must take this over".
IT management said 1) Conversion will be to version 7 and 2) No more
unhosted files.

IT (mostly MS background, such as (T-)SQL, VB and VBA with no FM
experience before starting this project) has converted (in test
environment) all to fmp7 and there are some issues left. (Our first
objective is functionally convert them to version 7 without making any
major changes.)

Most boil down to what was done in v5 by exporting to unhosted file and
we cannot figure out what would be easy to do with one or two SQL
statements to take a hosted table, delete all the rows and refill it
based upon data in another table such as all records from a previous
month. (It appears they get a month total by subtracting Last Month's
YTD total from this Month's YTD total!)

We've only gotten as far as manually creating the hosted temp table and
using scripts to delete all the records and some of the time, the
script "forgets" where that file is.

Other issues involve a report that used to total, but now the totals
row appears to repeat the last detail. (Sub-summary section acts as
"detail". Bizarre part is that fields referenced in sub-summary versus
its trailing grand summary counterpart are not the same.)

Is the update from 7.0v2 to 7.0v3 or 3a crucial?

If anyone has any experience with this, especially coming from an
Access/SQL/VB backgroud, we're all ears. (or in the case of text,
"eyes", I guess.)

Thanks,
-Scott

From that sentence I understand your IT people want FileMaker (FMP)
acting as a host or better (I hope) FMS (Server), be 'shared' in the
Operating System sense, and I suppose on a Windows Server X for
instance, serving every application including FMS.
If that is true, it is absolutely wrong and forbidden with FileMaker
(either FMP or FMS) and leads to corruption of the files sooner or
later.
FMP-FMS has its own way to 'share' fields and data - while using the
same physical network and their IPs than the normal OS does -. Then to
add, on the top of the FMP proprietary mode of sharing, the OS sharing,
will definitely lead to unsolvable conflicts and then unrecoverable
corruptions of the files.
The only correct way to setup a network configuration that includes
FileMaker is to have a normal PC server for any application and files
other than the FileMaker ones, and on the network a dedicated PC - being
set like any other workstation - with on it only FMP acting as a host
or - much better - FMS. The data bases themselves will have to be in the
'FileMaker' Server 7' folder or one level below - in a folder called for
instance 'Bases' -. Even more important, that 'Bases' folder containing
the data base files MUST be non shared in the OS sense. Practically, on
that PC, the Folder 'program files' will be non shared, and some folders
at the 'c:' level like the 'Backup' one can be shared and visible on the
regular network.
Read and make read the FMS manual and/or the numerous articles on the
FMI site or even in any FMP forum. What I said above is said and repeted
all the way through and cannot be avoided.
Unless you, and the IT people, want to go into hard troubles.
Remi-Noel