>In MY rather-limited experience with joins, it seems as though Nested Joins often pose major problems, whether it causes VERY slow querying time, or causes the query not to work at all!!!

Usually the latter...

>My question, though, is, with all the evidence to the contrary, is there ever a situation where using nested joins would be PREFERRED???

Not that I know of.

>It was using the Designer to form views w/ joins that first introduced me to the problems associated with nested joins. Yet the View Designer, apparently by default, automatically nests them no matter what.


Yup. And there's no way to turn this off. Not only creating views, but, as you ahve learned, simply opening a view that might have been created correctly will cause the view designer to reform the sql to use nested joins.

>I hope this is one of many improvements being made to the View Designer for The Next Generation (or whatever they're going to end up calling Version 7).

That would be nice, but in the meantime, look into my EView utility from the files section here. It doesn't create views, but allows you to edit them after you have initially created them with CREATE SQL VIEW. It also does a lot more than the native View Designer.