I don't work with Novell, but I have seen a number of posts over time dealing with problems with Novell. Have you seen these posts?

Have you tried removing the DELETED() tag? I know there was an article in FoxPro Advisor back in 1999 detailing how VFP pulls the entire index over the network, causing major performance problems.

>Hi everybody,
>
>We're running VFP applications and the Queries are very slow. Local stations use Windows 95 as OS, and we use Novell NetWare. What are our options?
>
>All tables have deleted() tag.