Evan,
thanks for your help.. however, i had already done something similar to this but was after being able to link to the table to retrieve other fields based on what is selected in the combo list. (ie from the selected value in the combo, retrieve the primary keys of the value to save to a table)
is the only way to do this by populating the list and maintaining the table, so that when the time comes to save you refer to the same position in the table as what it is in the combo list?

Jordan