>Can anyone see why Rushmore optimization is NONE on the following demo code? When EXACT is off, I get a "cartesian product" message for Rushmore. This happens when joining 2 tables on a fields that are varchar data types. Note that I am alernately using the = or == in the SQL commands. This looks like a potential bug to me.

Your SET(ANSI) is OFF.
With this setting, any "=" in SQL command is not optimizable.

This is by design,
because VFP don't store the varchar lenght into the index key,
consequently it cannot distinguish "A" and "A ".