I noticed that you have a quite a few ideas posted in this thread. I was just curious when you notice that the alias() is empty or the cursor is not available. Is it immediately following the select statement or later on in code? I ask simply because I noticed this happening too if _vfp.autoyield is set to .f. for some reason (possible set for an activex control but not reset to .t.) and the following code is run:

*In this example, periodically vfp closes the cursor before the report finishes
_vfp.autoyield = .F.
SELECT * from mytable INTO cursor mycursor
REPORT FORM myreport NO
USE IN mycursor

but both below code snippets work correctly:

_vfp.autoyield = .F.
SELECT * from mytable INTO cursor mycursor
REPORT FORM myreport NOCONSOLE TO PRINTER
DOEVENTS
USE IN mycursor

* or

_vfp.autoyield = .T.
SELECT * from mytable INTO cursor mycursor
REPORT FORM myreport NOCONSOLE TO PRINTER
USE IN mycursor

Just wanted to add it to the mix.


>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