If no record fulfils the condition, i.e. if no record is selected, the cursor is not created in the first place. Worse yet, you may have no-longer-valid data from a previous run of the loop.

That's why I second Hugo's idea, to use _tally, which will always work (and be equal to zero if no records are selected):

select ...
llIsKit = _tally > 0

>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