All files are on the same physical drive. Must be a cursor issue. Thanks for the reply.
>The only reason I can see would be if the two tables are not on the local hard drive or on a different drive than your default directory. INTO CURSOR NOFILTER writes the cursor to disk so all other things being equal there shouldn't be that much difference. I don't know if cursors are handled differently in a subselect as opposed to a regular open free table.