>I wish that VFP had a built-in way to track the original locations of all records retrieved for a view. I know this becomes impossible when dealing with the myriad choices for back-end databases (that is, the industry standard is to use a unique key value for each record), but for VFP's own tables (i.e., local views), this would have been a chipshot and made some programming chores a lot simpler.

Well, put it this way: In the database philosophy if someone likes you, and if you have a twin brother, then that 'someone' should also like your brother. That is: If you're changing something in a record and if there's another record exactly equal, then the other record should be changed too!
So, SQL should be able to find some form of uniqueness in the child table. That's why I said the uniqueness of a child table usually comes from the full record. If there are duplicate records, then they should be changed the same equally.
Although I'm saying this, I know it's not always like it. But it's a good base to think about it, don't you think?

Alex.