Here's some more weird behavior for you:

If prior to running the SQL-Select statement I issue a simple
=reccount('soitems')
then this problem goes away. I can see the soitems instaantly. Also a GO BOTTOM remedies the problem. It seems that Foxpro is not realizing that there are changes (more records/changed records) from the last time it looked so it's going off the cache rather than reading from the drive. What could possibly cause this (bug!) and how can I force foxpro into reading from the drive rather than the cache?