>>>Well, the solution would be quite easy in restructuring the menu if the customer wasn't such a complicated one.
>>
>>The saying that "the customer is always right" isn't always true, I have had my share of difficult ones myself.
>
>I'd go further than that. They tend to think in square-peg-in-round-hole solutions rather than explaining their problems. We as software developers are ussually better in finding structual solutions to their problems.

The real trick is to recognize when customer wants something and explains it in terms of GUI, the way he sees it. There's usually some quirk that makes that story, which usually seems to make sense, break apart and then we have to explain why it wouldn't work. And then gradually drill down to the initial problem that it was supposed to solve, and propose a better (simpler, more user-friendly) solution. Sometimes the solution actually already exists in the app, it's just that the customer didn't discover it yet.

But as the OP said, his customer keeps this one as a special case and behaves fine in other cases. I had one who absolutely hated combos and listboxes (actually I did have one listbox in a special case) and equally loved commandbuttons and grids. I had a big wide grid with 40+ columns, used for heavy input and with lots of code in .valid(), .when() and .lostfocus() of various textboxes, and groups of 20+ commandbuttons. And he loved it and extensively used the app. And he was a programmer once.