Adam,

You are trying to get the Valid rule for a filed to do something it is not intended to do. The valid rule for afiled is strictly to prevent bad data from getting into the field. You want to have that error out if the bad data gets past the user interface. Use the user itnerface to give the user information about what went wrong. A violation of a valid rule causes an error, you can use the error event of teh control to trap that error and respond to it. The message you are seeing is the error message.

Just let your valid rule return .f. on failure and in the error event of the control you can dislay the message any way you want.