>From what I understand, only the relevant portions of the index are moved over the wire, and then only the records as they are needed. >

I did some testing over a 56K WAN. It appears that the entire table is downloaded as soon as you open it. If I type USE 'table', it takes as much time to open the table as if I downloaded the table manually. Using ODBC did not improve performance; it also caches the entire table. My solution was to use COM; that works great.