>>>>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.
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>>>Do you mean my code doesn't work? What's the error message?
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>>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:
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>>
>>

>>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.

Yes, with thef appropriate index tags this work very well. Of course you could not know the right key fields, I wasn't also clear enough.. But you pointed me to the right direction, that is the most important thing. Thanks again.