Hi Steve,
thanks for your involvement. I abandoned this thread quite some time ago and recaped the bug more precisely in "Not a char expr bug?" #756782

To spare you the reading of the lengthy thread: Some see this BUG, some not. Could not nail it why. Suspicion re intl Win proved wrong. Maybe it´s when VFP7 AND 8 are installed, maybe VS .Net (beta)... Dunno.

>>

Local ;
tmpCursor as String  
...
Select iiD from (tableAlias1) Where Lower(cGrpName) == Lower(groupName) into Cursor (tmpCursor)

>>"Not a character expression"

I don´t think the error message makes much sense, but I can understand that the empty tmpCursor string throws the error. Wouldn´t expect this to work.

Same goes for
>>"Variable 'TMPCURSOR' not found
The message makes perfect sense.

In your third example the var is defined AND not empty, so this works as I wold expect.
Regards
G