I got it to work with the UNION. What I was missing (and the error was not telling me) was that my top select had date fields and my bottom select used a blank. As soon as I told it to put a dummy ODBC formatted date there, then the query started to work OK. So my problem was not looking at the dummy record closely enough when doing a UNION, because they have to match exactly. All this would have been very easy if the JOINS would have worked properly through ODBC in the first place.

I appreciate your time on this and your help at getting me going again.