Hi, John...
Hope you don't mind me sticking my $.02 in, but you're absolutely on target.
I've been working with Crystal for about three years right now, and have experimented with different ways of running Crystal from within VFP.
What you described is definitely the best way to go about it...use VFP and Rushmore to extract the data needed for the report, and then go stick the resulting recordset(s) in a FOX2X table and have Crystal use that...so I can completely bypass ODBC (yecchhh!)
So you're right on.
Kevin