No, I had column sparse property set to .f. and think that the strange behavior had to do with navigating the child grid and getting the out of range record error (by the time that happened I was starting to get overload syndrome and havn't gone back to reproduce the error yet). The grid in a grid would give me some dynamicbackcolor control that has some appeal so am going to do a little more looking there to see if I can determine the cause of the error. Thanks,