>Our case is the the second from bottom. Interestingly, in your case the last case with FLOCK() was slower than without.
>
>In any case, my manager is certain that WITH BUFFERING = .T. caused this tremendeous slowdown. He proved this by reverting to the old version of the program, that loads data in ~1h. (The new version never finished).
>
>I think we need to work with my colleague on a different algorithm. I do, of course, appreciate some input on the problem from MS or from Fabio, but our experiments proved BUFFERING = .T. to be a culprit.


What happens if you turn off TABLEVALIDATE or SET TABLEVALIDATE TO 1+4+8, just remove 2 :-) That way validation will not works during append/insert., but only when open and save records.