>I see indexes as part of the problem but I have never ( in 15 years with da Fox) seen this type of behavior before. The table is quite small, just a few thousand records.

hmmmm. I'd try deleting & recreating the indexes. Another thing is that reserved word. I had a problem a few years ago with a reserved word that was either a field name or index name (can't remember which it was)... but I recall it resulted in some VERY strange and unpredictable behavior and took us quite a while to figure out it was our problem.