Guys,
Thanks for the help. This little piece of code was apparently written incorrectly in VFP 7, but it did work. When it did not work in VFP 9 it caused me some worry, because I began to think that I might have little occurances like this pop up unexpectedly all over the place. I think that I got the idea for writing the code this way from the query generator at some point in VFP5 or VFP7's life, because when confronted with SQL that I don't know how to write I usually try to prototype it in the query generator, copy it, and then edit the results for my purposes. I would not stake my life on it...

Calvin