Russell,

>Thanks to both of you for confirming my thoughts on this. At least I haven't been wasting my time when there was an easier way. It's good to know that it will be in VFP 9. I think I read that somewhere, but had forgotten.

An interesting aspect of the new VFP9 WITH (buffering = .t.) clause is that it is at the level of each table listed, so you can have a SELECT statement that pulls from buffers on some tables and unbuffered on others.