>Yes, I know about TABLEUPDATE(). My point was that the deletes in the parent and child tables should occur "simultaneously." There should be no need to move the record pointer.

As far as table health is concerned, there is no such need.

It's just that Fox keeps sitting on the deleted record. You may issue a "locate rest" or some such command (even "skip 0" may work, haven't tried in a long time) if you want to make sure you're sitting on a valid record. Also, if you deleted the last record, you may be sitting on eof(), and you know several things which don't work in such a situation.