>That's kinda of discouraging(and confusing). I am supposed to think my sql select statements possibly returned incorrect data in vfp7?

Lets take a look at your query

Select detail, noun, sum(price), sum(quantity) ;
  from bsyear03 group by detail

There's nothing in the query that tells VFP from which record to take value for 'noun' column. The query is ambiguous. It's not documented but known that VFP will return value for the columns not icluded in GROUP BY clause from the last physical record in the group. It may or may not be what you want or expect. Even more, the result of the query depends on the physical order of data in the table. If you rearange physical order of data in the table the result returned by this query will also changed.