Bob,

The only thing I can think of is that when you have records in the child table, then at some level the DBC is opening this table automatically without an explicit command from you, but with no records in the child table it doesn't do that and then in the parent table's trigger code you are using the SELECT command it is not being found when there's no records in the child table. So, in the parent table's trigger code that generates the problem you could test to see if it is open before SELECTing it; IF NOT USED('childtable') then you open it directly.

Wally