Heh...ya that's what I thought of originally..and as matter of fact I actually did that a couple of years ago in another app. I was just trying to make this a little eaiser for the 'next guy' who comes along to maintain the code.
The rowsouce is actually a view...so I think I'm gonna try to add another parameter to it...determine if the controlsource is one of the 'archived' items in the rowsource (view) ..then simply include it in the view via the parameter ...thus making it appear in the combobox.

>Hi there Victor,
>
>Ok, now I understand what you mean... but I can't think of a way round the problem (and I haven't got 1001 prbs)
>
>But.. I have had a little experiment and (as you probably know) the control.value contains the data you require but the control.text is empty (x spaces). Maybe you could put 2 controls into a container one combo and 1 textbox (I assume the value would be readonly if it has been archived?)
>then in the refresh method put some code which checks these 2 values and makes the appropriate control visible.
>
>I know this was your first suggestion to the problem but this is all I can think of as well :(
>
>Sorry I couldn't be more help
>
>Will
>
>
>>I know what you mean...but in my case this still isn't the case. Let me explain a little further then...the record isn't acutally 'deleted' from the rowsource table...it is still in the table, it mererly has a logical field in the table that has been set to .F. to indicate that it's no longer supposed to appear in the combobox's dropdown. Problem is that they were getting too many of them and some are no longer used...so they wanted to sort of 'archive' them, but they still need to be able to see the old ones that are already there as they cycle though the database.