>>You've told us that file(dbf()) returns .F. What does dbf('aliasofcursor') return?
>
>I Can't remember exactly.. but it's in the form of
>c:\temp\xxxxxxxx.tmp
>
>But if you look in explorer that file does not exist

Will,
I won't go into discussion on this subject but all I can say neverthless how small might be the cursor and fit into memory (even the smallest possible with one record and only one logical field) it is created on disk (or should I say handle reserved). file() returning .F. or explorer not showing it doesn't mean it is not there. You can think of it as a file opened for copy but copy not finished yet. IOW if it has a name say xxx.tmp you can't create another file with xxx.tmp. You can test with a code like this :

create cursor mytest (dummy l)
insert into mytest values (.F.)
select * from mytest into cursor myCursor nofilter
lcFile = dbf('myCursor')
? file(lcFile)
handle = fcreate(lcFile)
? handle, ferror()
use in 'myCursor'
use in 'myTest'

Cetin