>Will,
>Stupid question, but why do you need a file presence? As mentioned by someone else, you can always make the cursor Read/Write if you need to modify it after the SQL SELECT. If you really need a file, then use INTO TABLE. Of course this has the disadvantage that you need to do the house keeping yourself.
>HTH

This is actually going into a grid baseclass - click on the column header and sort on that column.
Problem is - If I try and index on a cursor with no disk presence my VFP hangs.
I would really like to find a way to do this generically as otherwise I will have to go through all my forms which use grids and modify the select statements to use "into table" and then clean up after themselves.

Excerpt from Hackers Guide :

However, in some situations, especially those where the query result is then used in a subsequent query or where you want to index the cursor, having only a filtered view of the original causes problems. In VFP 3 and earlier versions, you worked around this by putting something in the query that outwitted FoxPro. Starting in VFP 5, it's a lot easier—just add NOFILTER to the query and FoxPro always creates a real cursor. 

I'm stuck :-(