Greetings Ed and welcome to the fray
>
>What about FOR clauses in any of the indexes?
>
>If all looks OK, I'd try doing a DELETE TAG ALL. and rebuild the indexes on the suspect table.

was already pretty sure that it aint an index problem (happens with different tables, different datasets and different forms) but tried your suggestion just to say I've touched that base.

I have. No difference.

But as I said to Jim, forget the potential causes for the time being. Help me understand where the hell this error message is coming from! It clearly isn't the normal vfp error handler; on Jims prompting I can now confirm that ON("ERROR") remains blank and I have no error handler of my own in action at this point. So where is this limited 'OK Help' error window being triggered from and can we switch it off? (hopefully, in the process, forcing normal error handling back on and giving me a chance to nail the bastard!

Thanks

Harry