>>>Yes
>>
>>Will indexseek("78113",.t.,"contacts", your_tag_name_on_custno) behave better?
>
>It should - the Locate prepares a bitmap of found records, expecting a do while found... continue... enddo loop. A Seek() doesn't prepare anything, it just retrieves a single record.

Sure. And as far as I know, indexseek() is the only approach that works with cdx index file, not with table itself; and this makes indexseek() the fastest among other methods. Still I guess that with 20000 records (as it was noted in the original post) "Locate" should not take sufficient time: something else is going on.