Like you said, FPD is not a client/server style application.
However, the data and the application are not typically TIED directly together. You can make the application resident somewhere and the data somewhere else - as long as your application knows where to look for it.
In fact you can have one version of the application running on the office PC's and a separate, independent copy on your laptop all running at the same time (although, you might need to be careful of file/record locking issues). Again, as long as everyone's application knows where to find the data.
As I mentioned above, you can immediately get rid of the long distance charges by having the office's "slave" workstation always on-line to your local ISP (appropriately Firewalled), making local calls to your ISP from your laptop, and utilizing PCAnywhere's IP connection with password protection. A number of my clients do this now.
Unfortunately any PCAnywhere solution will involve a "slave" PC at the office. Those costs cannot be avoided with this approach to the issue.
However since you seem to be using a WinNT Server you should be able to set up RAS to allow remote users direct access (not through a "slave" workstation) to the server via an outside connection (typically via a router). If you set up in this manner, your laptop would appear to the in-house network as any other network-connected workstation (in-house or not). Assuming that you have a local WinNT network support person, contact them about looking into it. If you can set it up, then you can also eliminate the cost of the "slave" PC.
Do a Keyword Search for RAS on the WinNT forum ( forum55 ) for more info.
Good Luck,