>>LOCATE and SCAN are not optimizable anymore.
>
>??? The online doc i got w 5.0 says that LOCATE and SCAN do use Rushmore

You can be sure that MS does not even know that these are not Rushmore anymore because they wouldn't have let this version goes online.

Someone played with that technology and things have changed.

Just test it. Built a 100000 records tables, do a tag on your field and LOCATE on it. To have the most do a SCAN.