Hmm, Now if I ship YOU the large table for these trials? ;-)

I've saved the original table, and will try it out someday when I have 'nothing to do'. You're right, it WOULD be nice to get to the bottom of it.

Barbara

>Barbara,
>
>I *think* more trials might well be in order here.
>
>The fragmentation theory might be *IT*, but it looks to me that, once you did the DELETE of 25000 records, the PACK would have "fit" in the space freed up by thos 25000 records. In other words, the re-PACKed file would be in (roughly) the same space as the original. I could see fragmentation causing serious delays if individual tracks were widely fragmented, but your sequence of events suggests that this is not the case.
>
>An interesting phenomenon for sure! And one that might be REAL enlightening to get to the bottom of!
>
>Cheers
>Jim N