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>the rest of the code is fine, it's just the addition of 86 columns and the deletion of the 'old' 86 columns, preserving all the properties of the 'old' columns, like ColumnOrder, and the like
>

Greg,
For 86 columns even doing it like that shouldn't take 2.5 secs. However you can significantly cut down the time if you used one single line of code to set columncount instead of individually deleting old columns (as I undertand you're doing something like removeobject).
If this is not a must at runtime you could save load time by doing that in designtime too.
Cetin