Fact is, when you put the question in there was no finder block included and after I added one it worked like it should do.
The answer is to read twice sequentially, as I found after testing for some time.
Are you serious? You mean you have to execute the same code two times to get the result?
This is at least unusual and it is not true on my machine. Your code is working here as it is supposed to.
Which OS do you have?
Which editor do yo use?
set ptd to path to desktop
set ptf to ptd & "test.rtf" as text
tell application "Finder"
set temp to (file ptf as alias)
set temp2 to properties of temp
#set temp2 to properties of temp
set thesize to size of temp2
end tell
thesize
Regards
---