In Word 2002/2003, when you first establish a connection, it can take quite
a long time whatever the data source (from what I have seen I suspect that
this is because of the support for excluding/including individual records).
I /believe/ that connection to OLEDB/ODBC type data sources is probably
fastest. I doubt if it makes much difference what the specific backend is
(FoxPro, Access, SQl Server etc.), as fetching the records is rarely the
slowest link in the chain). Probably the best thing to do is try the same
data loaded into your candidate databases/formats - it doesn't usually take
long to import/export from one DBMS to another.
Peter Jamieson