Hi, Nigel

You definitely do not have a syntax error. I once ran into something like this on a project I did. I called a method that created a cursor. Unfortunately the method was in an object that was in a different data session, and therefore the cursor was created in a different data session.

But since you are getting an empty alias IMMEDIATELY after creating the cursor,that can't be it. Must be something along those lines...

Can you post not only the create cursor code, but a good chunk of the code preceding it? Maybe we can spot something. BTW, have you tried running this on a different machine to make sure it is a VFP problem?