Jim, Walter,

>I think this behaviour of the deleted() tag has alway been there. I think that we were misslead by the fact that VFP (and FPW, FPD) could return filtered SQL resultset where the expression was fully optimized. When one (,more or all of the guru's) say that we should use an index on deleted() many of us will follow.
>
This, is exactly right, IMO. The filtered SQL is deceiving. FPD 2.6 to VFP 6.0 says it's done in record time, but none of the data has been fetched! This history was complicated by the fact, as Christof Lange pointed out; that VFP 5.0 was buggy in the way it handled the deleted records when in a filter.