>Unless I've just gone crosseyed from looking at those field names, wouldn't the following line cause an error because b.fld2b is numeric?
>
>(trim(a.fld1a)=trim(b.fld2b))
>
>I may have just missed something in the wording, or perhaps it was a typo, but it doesn't seem to me like that line could be executed.

See my reply to myself, I just noticed the typo too - problem with cut & pasting & using similar field names.