Possibly it was in VFP5 or earlier SP of VFP6. I know it because this behavior created problems when I converted old DOS applications to VFP.
Since then I have those two lines in all my applications.
Possibly it was a bug and it was corrected in latest SPs for VFP6 and in VFP7.

>I don't think you need two lines, one of which is 'set order to' as you can simply do this:
>
>select table1
>set order to tag1 asce
>set order to tage desc