>I think my SQL select statement is crashing because it has more than 255 characters in it - I am mainly using macro substitution and I can't reduce the statement any further - is there anything I could try to get it to work?

The limit on the size of SQL select or any other foxpro command is 8,192 characters. Maximum length of a string literal on other hand is 255. Can you provide more info that we can see where the problem is?