>>>This seems to be a bug in VFP 5, this works fine on my homecomputer with vfp 9 but at work it fails. Too bad for me . Could this be achieved w/o a left outer join (because left outer join has been introduced in VFP 5). Thanks beforehand. I have tried Edward's suggestion, but this is not workable.
>>
>>Do you mean my code doesn't work? What's the error message?
>
>With not workable I meant that I get my initial problem back : the query doesn't get finished. But I have changed your suggesion somewhat and that seems to work very well:
>
>
>

>Select * From oldtable Where str(mijbrpls)+ str(vlgnrbsv) + str(vlgnrplsvr) + str(vlgnr_mut)+ str(bdr_str);
>Not in (Select  str(mijbrpls)+ str(vlgnrbsv) + str(vlgnrplsvr) + str(vlgnr_mut)+ str(bdr_str)) From newtable)
>

>
>Thanks for your help.

You are welcome. I don't quite remember what it was, but it seems to me that I gave you wrong key fields (most likely, I could not know them at that point). Hopefully, you use appropriate index tags to speed up your Select statements.