>Hi George
>
>I hope this continued discussion isn't fraying your nerves. When I run this code...
No it isn't.< g > As a matter of fact, your persistence led me to figure out what was wrong with my test.

First, I got the about same numbers as you did. Then I went to my table, and with some modifications to the original code. This time generating random record numbers to retrieve a variable to search on. Again, without the tag locate was faster. However, went I went back to a literal, with the tag was faster.

There was something else here that I didn't realize at the time. The table was in the process of being modified. One of the modification was that the index had been changed from the single field, to a location value plus the single field. Still, I'm at a loss to explain why, in one instance (with the literal) reversed the normal (expected) outcome.