>The rowsource table is just a free table that's used as a lookup of choices for a single field in the cust table. These choices typically are changed on an annual basis.
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>I just never noticed this happening in the past. Apparently, when you remove a field in the rowsource (lookup) table that value is no longer available for display, so it displays a blank. I would like to figure a way around this...to display the value in the cust.refby field instead.

You may try using unbound combobox and do manual binding as needed. The behavior of showing a balnk value if the value is not found in the RowSource is the default behavior, but I don't recall right now it this the behavior for every RowSourceType or just for certain types.