>The problem that I was experiencing was related to filtering on an indexed child field (in either the Join or Where clause). If the expression could be optimized, I would get all parent records, regardless of whether they matched the child filter or not. This only happened when my child filter was on Child.ChildField = " " or Child.ChildField = 0. When the filter can be optimized, it basically treats each parent record as having a "phantom" child record pulled in by the Left Outer join, and the child fields for these "phantom" records have the FoxPro default values of blank, 0, etc. (depending on the data type), so they therefore match the filter.
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That actually makes sense to me with what I know about the way outer joins work. In the intermediate stage of the query, the fields that will eventually be null contain an empty value.

Of course, that doesn't make the results correct.

Tamar