>sergey,
>
>I would like to follow your suggestion but the table in quetsion is very large and I have a program that is seeking groups of records indexed by a particular value in the index field - if i do a search in physical order rather than in index order the process will take 10 times longer, which is why I was looking for a means to stop the table index being updated until the whole process is finished.

If Exclusive Use is not a problem, then: have you considered Setting the desired order and then copying the entire table (in order) to a new table (perhaps with production), then you can process the new table in natural order which happens to now coincide with your desired order. You will still need to use an xBase SCAN to locate the next record to process.

Alternatively before processing, select all of the Primary Key details and RecNo()'s of the affected records before starting the process. Set Order To 0, iterate through your selection, and when you Goto a record to change it, you can use the PK to verify that it has not moved.