Dave,
I gave Mike the SYS(1270) code. I like your idea better though. If his customer is like mine, they want to know when they leave a control whether the data they just entered is valid. Many customers, particularly US Gov., are stuck in this notification mode. What ends up happening for us is we validate controls as the end user exits the control and (because windows allows mousing around) when the end user selects save controls we have to validate all controls. Most customers I have that follow this mentality are of the UNIX/LINUX persuasion.