>FWIW, I ran George's test and was amazed to find out go top was about 400% faster than a locate. But locate nooptimize increased performance by 250%. It was still slower than go top but within exceptable limits.

As I said before, when filters are involved, I find LOCATE about 60% faster than GO TOP. 116K records, GO TOP takes 1.9ish seconds and LOCATE takes about 1.1ish seconds when a filter is set. (Filter matches the key) When the filter does NOT match a key, I still find LOCATE about 8% faster than GO TOP. YMMV.