The form is possessed! I believe your right about the form being corrupted. The controls came from a visual conversion of a 2.6 form to 5.0a. I then assigned the control source property to the corresponding field in the DE. I thought this would work since it was only a visual conversion and not a functional conversion. The fix was to recreate the form from scratch. I have not encountered the error (yet). - Jen (thanks again everyone)