Mike,
Not sure why intelli senese isnt working but would this work?
ds.tables("Rate").Row(0).item("NineMonthRate")


Yes, that was how I was doing it, but since I was using a strongly typed dataset I could do it like this:

ds.Rate(0).NineMonthRate

and avoid having to convert the result from object to decimal. Doing it this was also enables me to use intellisense, and will throw a compiler error if I change the structure of my dataset in the IDE and forget to change affected code.

To all who don't use strongly-typed datasets, I highly recommend them. They aren't that difficult once you figure out how to use them correctly, and there are many advantages.