>It's a series of SQL SELECTs with no intermediate processing.
>
>It roughly goes as follows:
>
>- SELECT a subset of records with specific characteristics (has a UNION)
>- SELECT some records INNER JOINed on first above
>- 4 UNIONed SELECTs to get additional records of interest also INNER JOINed on first above
>- FULL JOIN of last 2 above, producing result set of interest. All other results ignored.
>
>It just seems to me that I should be able to do this using SPT, returning the single final cursor of interest.

I don't know of any other way but to use #temp tables.

Select ,,, 
   into #temp1
   from ... Union select ,,, ...
select , , , 
   into #temp2
   from ...
   inner join #temp1 on ...
select , , , into #temp3 from ...
   union select , , , from...
   union select , , ,...
select , , , from #temp2
   full join #temp3 on ...
-- I usually do this because they seem to vanish only when you disconnect
drop table #temp1
drop table #temp2
drop table #temp3

And that's it. I'm doing this quite often, when speed requires and when all I need is on the server. Sometimes there's still some more to do in VFP later, depending on where the rest of the data are (i.e. I may have pulled some other recordset already, and it's simpler to reuse it in Fox than to pull the same set again for purity's sake).