Mark,
VFP probably just couldn't keep enough of the indexes in memory at once to make effective use of them. If it's a network you might try keeping an interim table on another drive that just had the HouseholdKey, RecnoOfRawTable that might reduce disk thrashing. Let one drive do basically a "sequential read" while another drive does random writes on a much smaller filesize table.
>Thank your for your efforts!
>Yeah, as a developer, I hate solving problems by 'throwing hardware' at it, but with deadlines, you gotta do what you havta. Hopefully I'll stumble upon something later that will explain it...