>As for the failure possibility you mentioned, I thought I had proposed to release the array first, then dimension it (to initialize it), then try to populate it, then test it. Why wouldn't that work reliably? What step is missing?

Rob,

The only way ti would work is if you released the array and did NOT dimension it. If your DIME it then the first element will "L" and it will cause the no records return to falsely tell you that was a record returned.