>I'm familiar with SPT and the various techniques for building strings but I was hoping to be able to exploit the power and speed of a SQL join for this process.

hmm... based on what you first said, you´d like to have a:

select * from Table where PK in (select PK AnotherTable)

where AnotherTable is a VFPcursor. For my understanding, this isn´t a join, but a sub-query. Thinking that SPT will send a command to be executed by the backend, and your desired SQL-Select would have part executed by the backend, and part by VFP, I can´t see that as something possible.

you´ll really need to find workarounds...