Moving the exe to the clients will only improve application launch speed. If the performance continues to be bad once the app is loaded, you are going to have to either use MS SQL Server or PC Anywhere or Citrix WinFrame.

Fox directly accessing the tables involves reading entire indexes across the wire before it can optimize your queries. Local views won't help much because the clients do the optimization.

SQL Server receives queries, processes them and returns only the resulting data over the wire.

Citrix WinFrame is similar to PC Anywhere, the wire is used to send screen drawing commands from the server to the client. However, PC Anywhere requires a dedicated computer per client, where WinFrame can host multiple clients like a mainframe hosts terminals.

HTH