>Try SET NULL ON and/or SET NULLDISPLAY TO "".

I tried it, and it did not work. Thanks for the suggestion! I hope you have more. :)

I guess I could scrap the LEFT OUTER JOIN and go back to the old way of handling outer joins, that is, NOT EXISTS (subquery) or value NOT IN (sub query). I would rather not, since it looks like the LEFT OUTER JOIN syntax runs faster.