>I work a lot with this kind of code, and I have never seen a cursor created with Select .. Nofilter which is not a .real tmp file. AFAIK all cursors, exepct filtered tables, are real files.

It's not always the case. I have seen cursors that existed in memory only w/o physical .Tmp file on a disk. The DBF() function still returns the file name in this case but file itself doesn't exist.