>I have always relied on the fact that memo bloat does not exist in any cursor or table that is opened exclusively. This issue has made me confirm that many, many times now. I've created a table (and also a cursor) with a single memo field in it. I have then made a tight loop, replacing the contents hundreds of thousands of times with no problem. So either the memo bloat can occur if "foxpro is really busy" (which I find really hard to believe) or there is something else at work here...

One thing that can be at work here is cache (RAM). In your test scenarios the RAM is likely available for a whole lot of megabytes. In your real application, probably also running with other stuff, the cache available for the memo field (whole cursor, really) is likely significantly less.

By the way, I'd say your disappointing result with NOFILTER is related to this.
I'm quite sure that NOFILTER would have lttle or no impact if the cursor was smallish to start with. But once it exceeds the RAM (cache) available for it then it will have to go to disk.

good luck