[...]

>
> If this is true, why ever using inner joins ?
> This way any inner join can be replaced. Am I right ?
>

I haven't really looked closely at your queries, but if you say the second one is faster, that's fine.
But do you really think that you can generalize for any or every query?

And you might delete '+0' from your first join of first query. That could be the cause of performance problems. You are effectively disabling use of index that way.

Sasha