John,

I've had a similar problem recently. I was running a rather large SELECT from a PRG interactively. I had been experimenting with a number of things and had commented out a large block of code above the SELECT statement.

Like you, I searched for stray characters, semicolons, etc., grasping at any small thing that might cause a problem.

After much frustration, I cut the SELECT code out and pasted it into a new PRG and it worked. I still don't know why this behavior occurred, but maybe this might be of some help.

Brent