>>Lets coll them "conventions' rather than rules - I hate rules:)

That's probably because most of the rules you've been given were actually just conventions or even worse merely someone’s opinion. I'll try and only use the term rule when I do mean rule. i.e. you break it, it no workey. :)

I have to go back and re-look at those movies. Sounds like some cool stuff to ponder.

Here's another link that shows an innovative way to present data, this ones data is more of a static nature, it's for a search engine:

http://www.kartoo.com/

>>And it has - I am fooling with a "home made" replacement for the OCX toolbars. At least I can use a "transparent" container - the packaged ones are cool but dated.

I was noticing how dated we look last night when I was playing with the VS 2005 beta. Be cool to see what you come up with. BTW, I was bummed to see that the icon editor in VS won't do XP quality icons. Looks like I'm going to have to break down and buy an Icon editor.

>>stateless" data GUI paradigm

Ok I get what your talking about now. I usually opt for a "semi-stateless" interface. i.e. remove the confirms and go directly where appropriate force the confirm when critical to the operation.

The old account ID concept still has it uses once in a while, and if you are buffering your form data I see no need for a confirm or new/edit button. (The enter key and double click are almost always the edit button in my apps.)

I've opted more for incremental search type combos for most of my lookups. For account lookups I use a separate database with multiple descriptive names for the account, auto generated on edit, but also editable later. That way if you have Sally Smith at XYZ Corp you can type Sally or XYZ and still wind up in the same place. Or if everyone just calls em those Bozos, you can add that too. In this case I do use Find and New buttons on my control, but I have been toying with the idea of having enter jump into a find if the user types info that doesn't match a record, the find then would lead into a new if no matches were found. I was going to play some more with that one of these days.