A couple thoughts on general VFP info:

1. What OS and how much memory are you using? A bump up in memory might help.

2. This approach puts VFP in the parsing seat -- if that's a bottleneck. Assuming VFP 6, do a STRTRAN replace on your "record" delimiter with CHR(13), then do an ALINES into an array and then parse each row in the array.

Jay