Maybe I'm the confused one.

There's no problem loading the combo with a 5 item picklist or binding the combo to a view field. What i'm unsure of is how to do both simultaneously. I've only ever used an unbound combo for picklists, or a bound combo listing the data in the rows of the bound field.

I guess the confusion comes from the idea that i've never tried a combo bound to one field with another rowsource. If I were to refresh the view, and the field value was not in the list, would the combo.displayvalue correctly show the field value? (I will test this)

Thanks for the direction...