hi eric -

thanks for the link to the support document. maybe part of the problem is that i'm not understanding the provider that i'm using? i am connecting with the connectionstring: "Provider=MSDASQL.1;Persist Security Info=False;Data Source=dev; password=dev" where "dev" is an ODBC DataSource using the native MSAccess driver. should i be using something else? also, i changed the oConn.CursorLocation = adUseServer and from what i can tell, having the cursor on the server-side should permit me to access the generated id but it's still coming up 'empty'. any thoughts other thoughts on this?

all your help is much appreciated.

piper