Any guesses on how an alias can disappear?

I have the following:

      SELECT * FROM components INTO CURSOR MyComponents ;
         WHERE KitID==lcPartNo
      llIskit = 0<RECCOUNT("MyComponents")

This is in a loop that is executed a few thousand times. On rare occasions, the second line fails with "alias not found" ... and when this occurs, ALIAS() is empty! That's right, I get a cursor with NO alias.

Any guesses on how to get around this? (No, it's not as easy as doing RECCOUNT() -later on, having done various and sundry other things with other SELECT statements, I need to get back to this alias --)

Thanks