SNIP>
>Well, the lousy news is that it is far slower. It's interesting that if I just type the select into the command window after setting deleted on, it takes about 20 seconds to run. In the exe it takes about half that time. I checked the optimisatin with sys(3054,1) and it says the query is fully optimized. As long as deleted is on, it appears that no matter what I do, it's damned slow.

How many records in the table? Soyunds like a lot if you have a 20 seconds first run.

Try removing the TAG on deleted() and see what happens - even if it says only partially optimized.

cheers