>I broke the form into smaller pieces an have avoided lots of fields on a single form like the plague since then. Since all of our apps made need to be upsized to remote ODCB source this has proved to be the safe path.
>
>I'll look in my archieves for the message -- the INDETERMINATE part at the end was the gem!

Interesting! I guess there're really two distinct problems here:

1) The SQL allowable length, which is...INDETERMINATE (and sounds complicated, I might add)

2) Designer/menu dialog length limit. This is where 255 may be correct. This limit is found on APPEND FROM, SQL, etc. commands run in the Command Window. If you add too many fields, especially using long names, your command will fail due to excessive string length. If you copy the same code into a program, there is no problem.