>>>>Using a ComboBox where the Control source is cust.refby and the rowsource is a table named refertbl.refby
>>>>
>>>>The customer has the capability to add new or delete records from the rowsource table.
>>>>
>>>>For example: A field that was in the rowsource was "Fall 08 Sample". It was no longer needed so it was deleted. Earlier, though, it had been selected and exists in the cust.refby field.
>>>>
>>>>Now, when the cust table screen is opened, the ComboBox displays a blank, even though the cust.refby record still contains "Fall 08 Sample"
>>>>
>>>>The customer sees this and thinks the cust.refby field is blank, when it's not.
>>>>
>>>>Is there a way around this action?
>>>
>>>To me, this looks like a case for Referential Integrity. The user should not have been allowed to delete the data in the lookup table, while it was being used somewhere else.
>>
>>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.
>>
>>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.
>
>The ComboBox has an option that lets the user type anything... but also select from a list. Alas, I don't remember the exact property. Is it practical to enable that option?

This is the type I had when I was made aware of the problem and I switched over to the base class version to see if I could "fix" it, to no avail. It was the same behavior.