>>As a practical matter, the 2nd processor does seem to pick up a good share of the load, and it improves performance noticeably, regardless if it's merely in an "accidental" or "incidental" sort of way.
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>The reason may be that VFP is, quite simply, not the only application that runs at any one moment. For a start, you have the OS itself.

Indeed - and I also have various 3rd party services running (Backup Exec, Diskeeper, Bindview, Eracent, etc.), which may help to spread the burden between the processors.

I think it's safe to say there's a good chance a 2nd CPU will help vfp app performance at least a little "indirectly" like this - but is it worth the extra bucks? That's harder to answer...I would say "yes," but that's only in my case, and it certainly may not be worthwhile for everyone.

It's hard to test, too. It's not like you can easily buy the 2nd CPU, install it, see how it does, and then uninstall and return it if it doesn't help much <g>