Hi Brian,
I think I better reverse myself on your first question. I don't know for sure if the join is to one table or the result of the first join. Now that I think of it, I believe it works like this: VFP makes its best attempt at optimizing the query. You can override VFP's guess by using the FORCE clause. I have never used it so I don't know how to specify the order of the comparisons. Steve's article may have dealt with this issue.
Regards, Chaim