>Sorry but I forgot to mention that they are local views. I will follow you suggstion about creating indices. Do I need to create separate indices for each part of the query or can I create a composite index contain the entire query expression. Yes they are parametized local views.

Then the tables are local VFP tables. Just create an index tag on each field that you will be filtering on.

index on upper(lastname) tag lastname
index on zipcode tag zipcode
etc.