G'morning David, 

 DW> That seems likely to me. The machine is doing something else for a
 DW> large fraction of the time, so speeding up the program makes little
 DW> difference to the time taken.

 DW> Do you have another machine you could try it on?

I'm a little leery of altering my test conditions (consisting of 
saving your message to a test area, moving into a CMD window, 
invoking qbasic to read the message and edit out all plain text, 
insert 2 timing lines [a$=time$ & ?a$,time$] and then running] 
from my original process....

Expecially when this version now runs from 0 to 10000
in >>> 3 <<<< seconds !

Well done - speed and style prevail.

:-))
 
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