>>Did you make sure that the collation on the tag is machine? I've seen weird things happen when it's anything else, and the index expression becomes a value conformant to current codepage's rules, not necessarily the same value that was calculated. Should not happen on character fields, but for any other kind of field, there's a possibility.
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>Just to be curious.Could this happen for a table freshly created? I have machine as default, so it never happened to me.

Yes it can. It's not something that happens over time, as a result of some bug, it's that when a value is written into a field, it conforms to the character translation table as per its collation sequence, so if e.g. your numeric index has a byte corresponding to é, it will be translated to a value such that it comes between e and f. Most of the time this doesn't matter, but when you hit such a value it's possible that a seek() returns not just a „not found“ but „not in index“, probably because seek() or other record-accessing functions respect the current set("collate"), not the one used when the index was created. Believe me, this was one of the hardest to catch, and it still found a way to bite me unexpectedly.

Now if you don't use any collations... where do ö, ü and ä appear in your lists? In their proper places or...?