I remember an app that I gave maintnance to, and I do remember that did something like the scenario you're describing, it was because the data was handled by Batches, so the programer copy all the data of the specific batch to a temporary table, do whatever he needed and then copy all the records to the original table, not without deleting the old ones before. The only think it that is was in Foxpro 2.6 for DOS, I don't know, maybe the prgram is needing something like working by batches, but any way, this causes a lot of marked records in the tables and a very poor performance, I think this is not pretty good aproache. bets way is editing the specific record.

not a solution, just a comment