>Like I said, I can understand WHY it has to be this way, but I do feel cheated having being made available to some brilliant DB commands in fox, only to have to be brought back down to reality with a different product.

Kevin,

VFP has a native database engine, VB does not. Simple as that. So it's not truly an apples-to-apples comparison.

Just out of curiosity, have you tried the same operations in VB.NET using the ODBC driver instead of the VFP OLEDB provider? It might perform quicker.

Laterness,
Jon