>>Hmmm, I seem to recall that I had that same problem with VFP and Excel a couple of years ago as well. I have noticed I no longer need a CLEAR ALL. I have since moved on to Office XP and the current versions of VFP as they cam along. So I do not know if the problem was corrected in Excel, VFP or both.
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>After doing some testing this behavior also exists in VFP 7.0 SP1. IOW, the data type changes to logical as soon as you hit the exit statement.
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>Surprising that no one noticed this before.

I know I have done that before, I guess I just never needed to return the "found" object reference before now. So what the variable flipped to after the looping never mattered to me until now.