Thanks for the info Nancy, and sorry for my delayed reply (I've been in house selling/moving mode the past month and as Barbara put it in her replay 'have been offline...'. "Non-printable" characters is what I was observing (not just a .F. when I expected a character). However, I *think* I saw those characters not just when the drop down list was closed but before doing anything, e.g. immediately when the control received focus. This caused a problem because I was depending or expecting a blank entry in display value for some testing, and the non-printable characters botched that up. Still I may be able to use your suggested workaround to deal with this, so thanks again.

Sylvia

>Hi, Sylvia-
>Yes! I'm really sorry I missed this post originally, because it is a pet of mine :-)
>
>I finally tracked down the behavior to occuring when the dropdown list is closed using the dropdown arrow. Here is a snippet from my base class cbo:
>

*~~ 01.15.99 nf 1: Added  .AND. ASC( this.displayvalue ) > 30 to beat the erroneous entry of a non-printable character when
>*~~				   the list is closed via the down arrow.
>IF TRIM(this.value) <> TRIM(this.displayValue) .AND. !EMPTY( this.displayValue ) .AND. ASC( this.displayvalue ) >= 30

>
>Of course it's only a problem with combo-comboboxes.
>
>HTH
>
>>Has anyone ever seen garbage characters in the combobox DisplayValue when you first get focus to the control? I get this behavior in a combo control and was quite surprised.