>... So what's the advantage of writing to a cursor with NOFILTER rather than creating a table on disk? The maintenance? having VFP deal with the creation and removal of the cursor on disk?

Right!

>...Since it writes to disk don't I loose the speed I was hoping to have using a cursor?

NOFILTER forces the disk presence, which is a temp file, but in many instances VFP may decide to create the temp any way - I don't know the exact circumstances...