>hi sergey - i was joking about the consistency part. obviously i'm hoping to understand why there is a difference.
>
>in response to your statement about the size of the table, it's a table with about 2000 records (certainly not big) but is ran over a network. nevertheless, the time difference is still 10x (both queries are run over the same network). therefore it shouldn't be the network that is the problem with the time difference. having it run over a network can explain why the query takes long, but as both are querying data from the same source, the time difference to me makes no sense.

Hi Paul

With NOFILTER VFP just does SET FILTER TO. The 2000 records are not copied at all (until something starts to scan them like your combobox population). With NOFILTER the 2000 records are copied from the server to the PC at the time of the query.