I read read your last letter carefully, and the solution works ( mostly, in you're example the resualts were incorrect if the first X% had no matches )... I replied simply for the sake of interst.
( and you alway seem to be the first to respod to my questions thanks again )

if you're curious the solution that I used was:

select *, recno() as recno from part where id like m.ending ;
union ;
select *, recno() as recno from part where id like m.Starting ;
union ;
select *, recno() as recno from part where between(id, m.Starting, m.Ending ) ;
into cursor realtemp ;
order by 1


as the between() will grab all between the wildcards, but nothing like the wildcards.

- jer