Hi,

if it really is the effect I am guessing,
it is the speed of using tables across machine
boundry - network acess.

One of the puzzling things is:
If you are the only one using the table, "use" is fast.
If another machine has the table open:
the first "use" of your machine will be slow
by a factor of 30 (we are speaking > 1 sec here)
if the table is open, in another data session or
even in another process, everything is fast again.

I suspect that to be more in the networking/rights area,
but I haven't nailedit yet: it can kill performance
in a LAN.

No VFP SET seems to affect it, I haven't done
scaledtimings against index size or sniffed
the network yet.

HTH

thomas