What VFP version are you running? Is it run in development or in runtime?
I've seen that in VFP7 when running any query from command window and than typing ? _TALLY with space after '?'. In this case Inthellisense changes _Tally to 1.

>Hello all! I have a SQL Select statement storing the results to a temp table. When the Select statement runs and doesn't return any results, _TALLY is returning 1. Has anyone seen this before? Can anyone tell me why this is happening? If I store the contents to a cursor _TALLY returns the correct value, but I have to use a table because of other processing that follows.
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>TIA!