Please Note: VFP 8

I have a cursor (crsAllCust) with a list of customer names. There are 30 records in this table.
I have another cursor (crsFillRate) with some customer data in it.

I need to join these tables to provide a count of how many records there are per customer which meet a certain criterion. I need a record returned even if there are none with a matching condition. There are three customers which have no data in crsFillRate. There are an additional two customers who have records, but without any data matching the condition.

SELECT  cust.customer, COUNT(*) ;
   FROM crsAllCust cust;
      LEFT JOIN crsFillRate fr ON cust.customer = fr.custshipm;
   WHERE EMPTY(fr.PartOrders);
   GROUP BY cust.customer

The five "nodata" records fall out of the result. By changing the query to

SELECT  cust.customer, COUNT(*) ;
   FROM crsAllCust cust;
      LEFT JOIN crsFillRate fr ON cust.customer = fr.custshipm AND EMPTY(fr.PartOrders);
   GROUP BY cust.customer

I get all the customers.

I think I've had this explained to me before, but apparantly it hasn't stuck (sorry Tamar). Could somebody please give me a refresher course of what the query steps are that cause the five records to fall out of the first query?

Thanks..........Rich