Hi Dennis,
The only thing I can think of is STATUS is an alias and not necessarily the table name. This will always (never say never or always) work:

create cursor newstatus from array whatever
append from dbf("status") for status <> 'B' and !deleted()

Just use the DBF() function in the append line. VFP programmers use this technique all the time for SQL Select cursors which have no permanent disk presence.