>Believe it or not, I did try changing the field order in the table itself, and it didn't work. This is wierd.

I don't know if it was just a typo in the code you posted, but I noticed there that you were repeatedly saying
column1.controlorder = 1
column1.controlorder = 2, etc.
not incrementing the column number. If that was pasted from your real code, that is probably your problem.

You shouldn't have to mess around with the columnX.controlorder property at all, just putting the right fields in the right columns' controlsources should do it. You're writing code to force the columns' default order, why?

HTH,