We've got a solution!

Thanks to all who responded.

The key was the REFRESHing of the data, but not the SET REFRESH itself.
By SETing REFRESH to a lower number (default is 5 seconds) of ,say, 2
seconds, our data could have been "not current" for up to 1 seconds - an
improvement. Note, its only UP TO 1 seconds, and not necessarily 1
second itself. The REFRESH will happen once each 1 seconds .. how long
you have to wait depends on when you started looking during that 1
seconds. You will recall that I experienced waits of 2 to 5 seconds.
My 5 second upper limit turned out to be REFRESH's 5 second default.

Because REFRESH works on ALL open tables, droping the time to 1 second
could really tie up system resources - ALL tables being refreshed 5
times as often! What we really want is a refresh on demand type
function but only for the table we are dealing with. Christian Berrigan
of Spartacus Development came up with the trick. It turns out that USE
will force the local buffer for that table to be refreshed.

The USE does take time ... about 2/100 of a second, but
that's a lot better than waiting up to 5 seconds like we used to without
it.


User B's code NOW looks something like this


use Food shared in 0
set order to Vegetable

do while .t.
use Food order Vegetable shared && This is the magic!
if seek("Turnip")
? "We found it at ", seconds()
exit
endif
enddo


Thanks again

Bob