Are you saying you put 2000 items in a combobox? Have you tried the original fast query and displaying it in two seperate colums in the combo.


>you're right, mike. it is the source of the combobox. however, the query itself (without populating the combobox) is what is taking a long time. i mentioned the combobox to see if there would be a way, after doing a select without alltrim, to populate the combobox and trimming there (thinking that might be faster).
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>it's a table with about 2000 records (certainly not big) but is ran over a network. nevertheless, the time difference is still 10x (both queries are run over the same network).
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>paul