daniel,
sorry for confusing you. i see what was happening. when i used the following code in the Page.Activate event it would show all the columns in the table (9 columns) even if i had the grids column count set to 7. it was simply reading in the entire table.

This.Grid.Recordsource=This.Grid.Recordsource
This.Grid.Refresh

i decided to forgo making PACK a user option and just went with SET DELETED ON.

next question. i have a combobox on a dataentry form that activates as soon as the form is displayed. it should only be active when it receives focus. i have tried setting the enabled property to 'F' and then enabling it in the GotFocus event but it doesn't work. any suggestions? p.s. nice bandana! :-)