>>Can you tell me a little more about your views? - I only have one VIEW.
>>
>>Does a single view gather info from all five tables? no - view gathers information from one table.
>>
>>On average what is the size (in records) of a view and what is the record length in bytes? it is small, about 1000 records, but growing...the record
>length in bytes is about 615.

So you are looking at 615 K every time you build a view. I don't see this as a problem on a 10baseT network which is capable of servicing at least 1 MB a second. If there are a lot of users on your network, this could be a serious problem.

If your view is parametrized with complex parameters it is quite possible to experience a slow-down in query speed. From what you have described so far, I believe this is your problem.

I generally try to keep my record length between 60 and 150 bytes. Of course this means that I have many related tables ( not related by persistant relationships), and am forced to use compressed character surrogate and primary keys. My surrogate keys are based on a base 249 character system and are at most 4 characters long. This keeps my parametrized views simple. If I have to fetch 1000 records, we are looking at 150K at most.

>>
>>Are the tables related via surrogate keys that are integer or compressed character based? only one main table used, but I have tables for my combo box

Remember that VFP3 has a problem with it's comboboxes in that if you go past 60 items, things really start to slow down. I hope you are using VFP5. The comboboxes are much much faster.
>values.... thanks rob