>The new Vista feature got me to wondering if VFP might benefit from writing TEMP files to a USB2 stick rather to an HD... no latency, no seek, etc.

I set temp files either to a raided partition or (when using JBOD setup approach) to an otherwise unused physical drive. Since I often generate a couple of cursors each above 1 GIG data transfer speed is paramount in my case, which works against USB sticks.

If I know a specific index is used mostly for seek-like access or rushmore with very high selectivity like a PK-search I try to put that index onto a no-latency device - sometimes creating specific non-structural CDX and linking manually with a general "opentable" function. If you have a RAM Disk on a beefy machine the results are spectacular, on USB I had measurably faster access but nothing to get exited about. But it might have been not the fastest USB combination - the RAM was so much faster that I just canceled further USB testing. Sometimes even splitting cdx and dbf in multi-drive machines (JBOD with 4 - 6 physical drives) helps a lot on SQL joins.

regards

thomas