>I never skip the first 10 work areas. "SELECT 0" Would I see some radical set of results returned, or would it be that it cannot find the field in the expected "a." alias?

The concern is that if some table outside the query is open in workarea a, when you reference a.field in the query, it'll look in that table. I don't know if this is really an issue for queries, it definitely can cause problems with variables. Try this:

a=createobject("form")
a.Caption = "Test form"

Should blow up as VFP looks for a table in workarea A.

Tamar