>>the tables are bufffered if that makes any difference.

Looks like it was....there is a setting within the data environment which allows the setting of the table buffering to override that of the form. And they were different... so I set all tables to use the buffering setting of the form, and set the form to "optimistic buffering" and it appears to work now.

The weird thing was that the lookup value was displaying information from a record offset by only 1 record.

-- L