I was not in the habit of using NOFILTER with SELECT, and VFP will quitely attach a filter to the original table whenever it feels appropriate. Once I wanted to move some records from table A (having 400,000 records) to table B. I executed a query

Select * from A where field1 = "XYZ"
BROWSE

The result looked OK. Then I used the following commands to append the result to table B.

SELECT B
APPEND FROM DBF('query')

And, I ended up adding the entire table A to table B! Now I try to attach NOFILTER to all queries. Perhaps VFP should have some default for NOFILTER setting.