Tracy
Thanks for the great solution. I like both of your recommendations to identify autoIncrement fields for exclusion from the GATHER. I prefer the second solution because it will "just happen" in the frameWork without the need to update a table with the excluded fields. In retrospect, I can certainly understand why VFP barks at me when I attempt to GATHER a read-Only field, but it doesn't bark at all times when the logic is repeated elsewhere in the code. "Foolish consistency" may be the "Hobgoblin of small minds", but not in the sphere of programming languages.

You provide the more complete solution, but Jerry responded first, hence, he is the 3-point winner

Thanks, Vince