Hi Barbara

thanks for your help.
I was led to believe that it is not possible to mix the "old" and "new" types of joins. (Last paragraph on p. 739 of Hackers Guide to VFP 6.0) However, I tried your suggestion anyway. Although it does seem to be possible to mix these join conditions under normal circumstances, it doesn't work for me because some of the tables that I am joining (with the "old" syntax) need to be opened twice using an alias. My outer join conditions (using the "new" syntax) must reference these alias names. I get the error, "Alias 'cAlias' is not found" when executing the SQL, which now looks something like this:

SELECT field1,...,fieldx;
FROM table1,...,table5 alias5, table5 alias6;
INNER JOIN table7 ON expr7;
...
INNER JOIN table9 ON expr9 (using alias5)
INNER JOIN table10 ON expr10 (using alias6)
WHERE table2.ID=table1.ID AND;
...
table6.ID=table5.ID