Jeff,

>Yes, I am ending up with duplicate id's. What happened is their entire system crashed and they reloaded the app. This set the key values back to their defaults. So, when they merged this data with the master files, there was a whole slew of dupe values. I guess maybe what I was looking for was some type of key generator that would function similar to the random keys in access. The files are not huge, maybe 50k records or so. Thanks for the input.

Roi gave you a good link to GUID generation while I was looking for the same thing here. You can use the calendar to loop up messages on 8/31/1999 and find the thread "Unique ID Generation", which has similar code (maybe the same code?).

I think the GUID is what you are looking for.