If anybody cares to undergo an archaelogical study in the sources of CMS to find the cause of the problem, the following exec is 3.7 times slower under 5.5. The long complex expression is basically equivalent to 'a=a', but it shows that we can expect very serious performance degradation on complex expressions under CMS 5.5 /Eric /* Reach for the top! */ a = Copies('*',10000) Do 1000 a = Left(Left(Left(Left(a,Length(a)),Length(a)),Length(a)),Length(a)) End