I'm also using a combo with disabled items in ana pplication at work. I found that the backslash character only had to be inserted in the column to which the value property was bound, in this case column 2. This is with VFP 6 SP5.

I used the AddListItem() method to the value into column 2 of the combo. This method only takes character values, while the cursor that will store the value selected by the user is N(2). BoundTo is set to .T. Pleasantly to my surprise, I didn't have to do any special processing to use the value. VFP automatically strips out the backslash character and handles the conversion of the string to numeric. Nice way to go, VFP team.

John