Good ideas, Vlad. The records kept were the ones at the end of the table, and my disk was de-fragged less than a week ago, with 1.5 GB free space on a 3 GB disk. However, it DOES make sense. Goodness knows where those last 5000 records were stored on the HD

Thanks
Barbara

>The only explanation I can find: The table (and the indexes) was stored in a contiguous disk space before pack. When you packed it, it became very fragmented on the disk. Is your drive almost full? Is it very fragmented?
>
>Almost obvious, it is not a VFP problem.
>
>Vlad
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>Today I deleted 25,000 records from a 30,000 record table, and packed it. A SQL (40 records) which had been taking <1 sec. now took 15 sec.
>>:-(((
>>So, I:
>>
>>a. reindexed. Still slow
>>
>>b. re-packed Still slow
>>
>>c. checked every clause in the SQL and matched them with indexes. Still slow
>>
>>d. Restored the original. Speed was fine. :-))
>>
>>e. Deleted, speed was fine. :-)
>>
>>f. Packed - slow again :-((
>>
>>g. Copied data (5K records) to a temp file, ZAPped and appended.
>>
>>Speed is now terrific - almost too fast to see. :-)
>>
>>Question: Why did this happen?
>>
>>TIA
>>Barbara