Great, I understand the problem now.

One of the idea would be to have a special class. This class would be a container, consisting of combo and a textbox, which would cover display portion of combo. I think, such class must already exist in Downloads section here. So, your combo would have only current employees, but textbox would display the correct info, if employee already left the company.

Another idea would be to change combobox recordsource on the fly depending on is it an old contract or a new contract
(you can apply different filters on the employee table and requery the combobox).

I guess, there are other approaches for your problem, but these two are most obvious ideas.

>Nadya,
>
>I'll try again, :)
>
>I have two tables, a contract table (parent) & an employee file (child).
>
>Each employee has an employee number. Every contract is handled by an employee, so I have a relation set into the employee file on eomployee number.
>
>All is well, when the user goes through each contract the correct employee is displayed on the form (name etc).
>
>However, the company have a high turnaround with employee & they are alway leaving!
>
>When an employee leaves I want them to be removed from the combo for any new contracts I add, but when going back to an "old" contract the correct employee employee should be displayed.
>
>Hope this is a better explanation, think your Russian will be much better than mine!
>
>Rob
>BSS