Well, my original message has unleased a firestorm of responses and even generated some discussions about thermometers. I'm afraid my original reference to .thisform is dreadfully out of scope in those discussions ;-)

It has been very illuminating, which was my intent, and I now know that I should be a lot more scope sensitive when using relative references, especially 'thisform'.

I've also learned that it's important to insure that filter conditions are static, once set, and several of you have provided efficient means for doing same. Thanks.

As for filters being a little 2.x'ish (David) well you're right. My job for the past year or so has been to hack some 2.x code into the 21st century (which hasn't quite arrived yet, despite what the mass media wants us all to believe). In the meantime, I've been learning VFP as I go and I've started to get semi-facile with Queries (r/o SELECT-SQL). Not sure if UT jargon combines both updateable and non-updateable SELECT-SQL as 'View'...if yes, then I'm already using 'Views' a little bit. I'm a little hinky about the updateable ones cause the issues about what's locked and what's not and what get's updated when and all that stuff breaks my head to begin with...and updateable views seem to add another layer of complexity to all that.

Thanks to all for the feedback.