Thanks for the tips. I did find a work around that is actually better than my original algorythm, scince an insert sets the inserted into table open with the record pointer at the new record, I simply asign the new primary key from the record directly. I must have stepped it through the debugger 20 times before it dawned on me that the table.field part of the select's where always showed the correct value when I moused over it.
Sometimes we make life harder on ourselfes than we need to!