Thanks... Access 2000 is I believe the older DB structure. I use Access 2007 here and that's the V4 structure. I'm totally focused on this issue right now. and it's nice that the new support issues have been mercifully low. I'll have an update soon. Right now I'm licking my wounds from a failed experiment that appeared promising as a workaround. It didn't work, and there went 4 days :-( Back to working on the repro scenario for MS.