>thanks.. i'll look into it. However basically i'm looking for a non-asynchrounous solution. instead i'd like it to pull max of 20 records at a time then waiting till when user scrolls or presses a key (for the visible portion of the combobox and drop-downlist).
>i'm not a fan of asynchronous access (which i understand to be background continuance of record transfers) since it's basically wasteful of bandwidth, and CPU processing

Hi
Asyncronous=.T. + FetchAsNeeded=.T. is what you are looking for and you can see it in sample form, last page. Watch status bar and you will see how next 20 records are retrieved from remote source as you scroll in listbox part of combobox