>Maybe this will put it into perspective:
>
>Take the VFP EXE/Run-Time and strip out the IDE and all the GUI related commands/statements; what you wind up with is the "VFP ODBC Driver" (ie. a portable version of the VFP "data engine") with an ODBC API bolted on.
>
>The only difference between the VFP ODBC driver and the native VFP data engine is that the ODBC "might" be doing some extra bachground fetching.
>
>If the ODBC driver outperformed the "native" data engine it was a "fluke" and a review of the original code would have solved the problem (or simply rerunning the same set of samples a couple of times to allow for caching).

As a seasoned VFP developer, I can tell you the code was reviewed and re-reviewed. We couldn't believe our eyes once we ran the tests, and the test results were duplicated over and over on the same network. It was no fluke. Results may vary on different networks, but that was what we got. Thank you for your excellent analysis.