Randy, my experience has been that:

If you run a form with a bunch of tables opened in the DE or explicitly opened with USE (doesn't matter) over a mapped network drive that the form will be slow to load. Now, leave the original form open, and re-run the same form again. You should see that the time to load the second form was a fraction of the first.

It seems to me that Foxpro can access the tables infinitely faster if the tables are already open in another Data Session. So, that being said, you could keep the tables open in a background form and then all subsequent forms should run substantially faster.

I'm curious if you see the same behavior?