As far as I can tell, the only thing that fails is that the alias disappears. The cursor exists, and seems to be usable other than that.

I'm not so much looking for a workaround, but rather I'm interested in learning what's going wrong -- if this alias disappears, must I worry than other aliases might as well? Or, are there special circumstances I can be aware of?

>Did you try using _tally instead of RecCount()? (I know is not exactly the answer you want, but I can not think of any reason while the alias would be closed in your scenario.