>My take on defragmentation (or other ways to make files contiguous on a drive) is that it is not a good thing to do on a drive/partition that houses production VFP tables and their associated files.
Yes, I remember you commenting on this topic. But in this case, it may well be that excessive fragmentation caused the slowdown. Fragmentation which, in this case, probably mixed up VFP data with other data.
Your suggestion of not defragmenting makes sense - keep related data together, even if it belongs to different files - but that assumes it is not too mixed-up with data from unrelated tables!
Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire... (from Gulliver's Travels)