Well, at the risk of belaboring this relatively unimportant matter..
I set the control source of the text box to a table field with a length of 5 characters. The length of the text box .Value still changes with the width of the box (and padded with spaces accordingly).

I say this is relatively unimportant because of the ALLTRIM I always do....but, I am just trying to figure out what the 'rules' are and maybe..why?

Thanks again for your time..
Pete