Hi Nadya,
>I have one idea. Have some flag to not close tables and leave everything open like Steve's code does. I'm going to try it to see if the performance improves.

(I guess this was meant as a personal reminder, but anyhow... <g>)
This is a good idea, but should be done (if possible) in the exact target machine situation.
Opening tables is one of the operations which can take very differing amounts of time depending
on OS / Pathstructure / installed drivers / network topology and so on. If run your testcode (just) locally on your developer machine, your estimates/optimizing approaches can be wholly off base.

Secondly, don't depend exclusively on coverage profiling. Profiling introduces it's own problems when done for performance measurements. You should read up on different methods to find "slow code" and the possible reasons for using/combining them - not only in the small area of vfp but in other languages as well, as some of the problems/solutions apply there as well.

HTH

thomas