>Having said all that, it still doesn't help you with your problem. Are you working against tables on a local HD or against a server? If the latter, what is the network type, and what client software does your machine use to connect to the network?
>
>Also, although the source tables may be small, the result set may not be... how many rows is the query returning when it is successful? You might find you get a lot fewer with exact matching and/or using UPPER() etc.


I still don't know what the problem was, but I got around it by simulating an outer join (like the example below, from the VFP online help):

SELECT customer.company, orders.order_id, orders.emp_id ;
FROM customer, orders ;
WHERE customer.cust_id = orders.cust_id ;
UNION ;
SELECT customer.company, " ", " " ;
FROM customer ;
WHERE customer.cust_id NOT IN ;
(SELECT orders.cust_id FROM orders)

Less efficient, but it always works. My result set was only 99 records, and the source tables only slightly larger (just test data on my local drive). Another unsolved mystery of VFP. If I had a nickel for every one of them...

Thanks for your input.