Nadya,
There is a J: in path. I suspect it's a net drive and think it might be affected with metwork load. Remember the FLL I sent you once upon a time ? There using lowlevel a text file was parsed into unique words, written back to another text file, appended in VFP and indexed. It was processing apprx. 1 Mb per sec. in my old box (Athlon 500- 64Mb RAM).
Cetin