Sergey,
I always use Machine, except for tables including norwegian letters, like in my customers table. Having experienced all the trouble with international charecters from the good, old MFOXPLUS and DOS days, I try to only use standard 'lower bits' ASCII whenever possible.
>Tore,
>
>I still think it has something to do with SET COLLATE but I could be mistaken.
>
>>
>>I did some more testing, and it seems like I may have had some table corruption. I reindexed the table, and the results were as before, meaning slow on VFP9, instant on VFP8. But after I did a series of COPY TO newfile WITH CDX, first to a temp file, and then from the temp file to overwrite the original file, everything is fine..! I am convinced I did the exactly same thing yesterday!!
>>
>>Thank you anyway for the tips. I will do some more testing later this afternoon/night, I will send you a private email with some sample data if the problem reappears.
>>