Hi,
If you are running the exe from drive C and the data on the network, make sure there are no data files on drive c, as VFP gets confused and accesses both and can loose the plot totally.

Check the SET PATH TO statements, VFP may be looking in the wrong places.

>Thanks Tamar (and everyone else). I did "display status to filename", both when running the main program from within vfp8.0 and when running it from the desktop.
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>two differences that i can see.
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>1. set escape is off on the vfp8.0 version. it is on in my app. i doubt this has anything to do with the problem.
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>2. i mentioned earlier that i am doing this testing directly from the server. well, when i display status from the vfp8.0 version, it is accessing the tables from the c:\drive. When I am doing the program from the app, it is using the UNC name, which is \\hppav\tasks\t_memo, etc. this to me sounds like it could be a problem - perhaps it has to drill down through a number of areas to get to \\hppav\tasks before it reaches each table. just a thought. if so, i'm not sure how to enforce the use of c:\tasks in the application (for testing purposes). any help would be appreciated.
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>dragan, I took a look at my runtime file to make sure they are the same. that hasn't been checked and there was a vfp6run.exe within the folder. however, it also had all the vfp8 run time files. i deleted the vfp6run.exe and tried again and no change in speed (still slow).
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>hopefully there's a clue in the above. if so, please let me know. if i should post my status file for comparison (if anyone wants the fun of looking at it to see if they spot something that i didn't), let me know. Thanks again everyone for all your help.
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>mike, thanks for your response (and your offer for help - very generous). right now i can't do that as access is a problem for outsiders. i do very much appreciate your offer though.
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>EDIT - I have checked this on another computer in our office and while that computer is not as recent as the server (ie its specs are not as good), it runs the query in 1/3 the time as the server. i checked the status of the other computer and it was using the UNC naming. therefore i don't think this is the problem.
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>paul
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>Paul