>There are only very periodic inserts to this file
>There are no memo fields.
>The date ranges I am extracting are always sequential in order.
>I think the problem has to do with the fact that it is a date field.
>While playing around with this I added a field to hold the value
>of the date Example 20000512 instead of {^2000/05/12}
>

What are the -exact- index expressions that are being used for optimization of the query? My guess is that something in your index itself is the source of the problem; I have lots of indexes on dates and have not seen performance issues using basic optimizable expressions such >= < BETWEEN and the like, but the tag expression format must match up exactly.