OK, what kind of numbers are we talking about here? Ballpark figures for number of directories, number of files and file size range would be nice.

Using your code I could get Fox to waste a bit of memory but the DBF functions had nothing at all to do with it. That is, the behaviour remained exactly the same when I replaced the INSERTs with things like

= FULLPATH(laDir(i,1)), FILETOSTR(laDir(i,1))

and disabled all other DBF-related statements like the CREA TABL.

The 'penalty' for scanning the Windows tree of an XP installation in this fashion was about 50 Mbytes and this memory was not reclaimed when the scanning ended (peak memory usage was 75 MByte higher).

However, the memory was freed immediately when I played around with SYS(3050). So you could place a limit on memory use by using SYS(3050) in the fashion indicated by Jim Saunders, or you could use a temporary SYS(3050, 1, 0) every once in a while to force-free all lazy buffers and then reset the limit to its former value (similar in idea to SYS(1104)).