>I got you there. But how does any of it affect the grid object?
>
>Is there any known issue on the grid object where properties assigned at design time gets reset or something?

Well, you have an intermittent error so the problem could be elusive. Basically, grid cannot exist without a recordsource, so if you leave it for some time without one it will grab the nearest table (e.g. in active area) and try to use it for this purpose. When grid gets this innocent table it may find out that number of columns is greater that number of fields in the table. The next thing grid may decide that a programmer was plain dumb and extra columns should be dropped. If the column where the error happened is somewhere on the right side, e.g. #6, and you have some table with 5 fields around, then it might happen that the whole thing is not totally baseless.