I would believe because that is what I expect it to be.

"What I am looking for is anyone who would have a clue as to how a cursor in "memory" could EVER experience memo bloat."

Maybe answer is hidden along this lines. That cursor is not kept in memory. It's another table on disk. Any cursor has a a disk file handle no matter how small they're.
Instead of replacing a memo thousands of times, you could scatter it to an object and set object.memo value instead. VFP doesn't check if that's really a physical table's alias or just an object name so you could use that in place of an alias.fieldname in many places.
Cetin