Geoff,

>I did, some time ago read something about the deleted() indexes and decided to give them a wide berth.

Well you don't have to never use them, they can be quite beneficial under some circumstances. The right decision is to look at the performance impact with and without and choose the optimal solution.

>I am looking (in the interim) at using an ODBC connection to access the view remotely but am not sure, at this stage whether that will resolve much of the problem. Any advice you might have on this would be much appreciated.

Remote views don't mean VFP tables accessed across the network. I definately would not use ODBC to access VFP tables from VFP, that's just going to slow things down even more.

>Is it because I was using ODBC that my view lost its buffering???

Buffering is controlled at several points, by default views open up with optimistic table buffering. You need to check your form or other code to see what's caused the buffering change.

>Also, People seem to be talking about VFP8 as though it has been released, have I missed something???

VFP8 went into public beta shortly after Devcon, you can download it http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/ (although it's a 200mb download so you need a pretty fast pipe to get it) and play with it. VFP8 is due to be released early next year.