>I also remember back when I used ADO records sets with VB, that ADO was set up to only return a buffered number of rows, to cut down on server/bandwidth time. Don't know if that helps any, and don't know how to impliment a partial load for a combobox, but might point you to some other ideas to chew on. Goodluck, Let us know.

Thanks to all who answered, really appreciate the feedback!

I personally don't like forms taking more than 2 seconds to instantiate, but I will probably ask my users what they think.

My fallback plan on this is to have the app itself populate LOCAL tables from the lookup data in the server at STARTUP and then populate the comboboxes in the forms from the local tables. From a few benchmarks I've ran, the difference between getting data from the server and getting it from the local hard drive is about ten fold.

Alex