Thanks to everyone who replied. I finally figured out the problem. This is an old application and I missed the fact that field master.objdesc is a memo field and it cannot be in a GROUP BY clause.

In this case I am not sure why original program included it since it is the used to define the field "desc" which is what appears in the report.

But that leaves open the question of what would I do if the memo field has to be included in the cursor and a group by clause was required for the output? Is there a general way around this limitation?