Thanks for the response Ed. With the set memowidth command the value of 1024 would work fine, and that is what i thought... and did... expecting it to report the correct number of lines using MEMLINES, but it does not. There are 19646 lines in the memo field, but when i SET MEMOWIDTH TO 1024 and then look at the value of memlines() and it reports 2479, i tried the value you suggested 8192 and memlines() says 303. So, what i thought was happening isn't, i expected it to give me the number of lines in the memo field. If if set memowidth to a smaller number, like 150 i get close... 19092, but "close" isn't what i need! Is there some other setting I'm missing? Help wasn't very helpful (surprise).

Thanks for the info on the low level stuff too, I'll look into some of that as well.

This has been frustrating because it is another case of where I read the docs about something, *think* I get it, and it doesn't work the way I expect... maybe I should take a hint! ha ha