>If I were writing this thing from scratch, I'd do as you suggest, but unfortunately, with only God knows how many lines of code existing in this app, I don't have that luxury. Do you think it's safe to count on tricking VFP the way I'm doing it?

No, it's not safe. Your results are not reliable.

I explained it in another message (to Mike Yearwood) that I'm trying to find a way around an SQL call taking too long, so I need to see deleted records in the returned cursor with their flags still set in order to speed things up.
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>I can speed things up from anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds down to sub 1 second if I can use this trick. But if this behaviour is likely to change in order to standardise along ANSI lines, then I need to find another way to do it, and nothing else I've tried has really worked well so far.