>Micheal,
>
>can you give some more details ? Is this 12 remote sites with each one or more workstations, or 1 site with 12 workstations ?

Yes, this is 12 sites running a VB client that connects to a central SQL Server database.

>Can you give an indication of wait times (I know this is not evident ...)

To be honest, I don't know specifics.

>What is a VPN ?

Virtual Private Network. Using PPTP, your LAN's network packets are packed up, encrypted and transmitted over the Internet.

>Is a comparison possible between SQL server over RAS and VFP tables over RAS ?

Not really. VFP is a desktop database; meaning that the query is solved at the workstation. All those indexes and tables must be brought over the wire in order for VFP to determine which rows meet the query (There are optimizations that work to limit the data movement but it still have to happen). To contrast this with SQL Server: With SQL Server, a query is sent over the wire. The server, which is local to the data, solves the query and creates a result set which is sent back across the wire. A couple hundred bytes in one direction, a couple thousand bytes back.

-Mike