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I believe its always been the case that files on the local HostFS filing system cannot be locked. I've never been sure why its so difficult to achieve file locking but I wondered if it would be possible. The reason is that today I had to restart VRPC and it failed to start because most of the files in the VirtualRPC-SE directory had ,fff appended to the file names. Obviously someone had somehow copied these files using RISC OS. Nobody owned up to it and I didn't do it and I can't be sure if its been damaged. This kind of problem could be avoided if the files could be locked.

HostFS provides RISC OS with a way of seeing directories and files on the host operating system. In this case we are talking about Windows. HostFS can only "do" what the host OS can do and as far as I am aware there is no way of "locking" a file under Windows. Hence HostFS cannot lock a file - because the filing system underneath (NTFS) can't do it.