There's no way to specify from which table RECNO() will come from and no guaranty that it'll be correct. In general, the functions that can accept an alias as parameters are not guaranteed to work correctly when select involves more than one table. More details at
http://www.berezniker.com/content/pages/visual-foxpro/queries-and-functions-which-accept-alias-parameter.
>(at least under VFP9) recno() works perfectly well even with joins but it is deleted() that you shouldn't use with joined selects. Better do not use both for easy controlling of SQL. You didn't say what is your intention (or yuou did but I didn't get) so I don't have an idea what the SQL might look like. From the two SQLs I see I can't derive anything.
--sb--