Marcia, I am surprised that you can do this mistake. :-)
Set Top can be extremely slooooooow on a big table. Instead you should use Locate.As you may remember, Andy did several sessions on optimizing VFP code and this is what he wrote in his 2005 session:
Locate vs Go TopOne of the conventions that has passed into FoxPro mythology is that a LOCATE command is faster than using GO TOP, and that by reversing the index order on a table and using LOCATE performance is better than just using the GO BOTTOM command. However, as the following table shows, this is only true when you are using Filters and is more to do with the fact that the LOCATE command is optimizable (as shown above) than anything else. In VFP 7.0 the difference between the two commands is smaller than in previous versions anyway. Of course, GO TOP and GO BOTTOM retain one huge advantage over LOCATE because they can take an IN alias clause, thereby obviating the need to change work areas.
Methodology GO TOP LOCATE GO BOTTOM INVERT INDEX AND LOCATE
No Filter 0.030 0.060 0.300 0.070
Filter Not Optimizable 0.010 0.020 0.100 0.071
Filter Partially Optimizable 0.010 < 0.001 0.952 0.140
Filter Fully Optimizable 0.010 < 0.001 1.021 0.140