>This didn't work as I thought it would. It leaves the program too early and doesn't finish the job.

>If I have an alpha ID that is 5 characters long always, and I want to increment say, from "aaaag" to the next ALPHA ID, it would naturally be the following: "aaaah", but the below doesn't give me that; it actually returns what I started with.

Take a look at the code that I replied with earlier in this thread -- it does exactly what you expect above (but it uses uppercase only -- you could adopt for lower case; just change the ASCII range for characters. It also respects the field length -- keeps at 5 chars, i.e. 00001, 00002, .... 000AB, 000AC, etc.