Thanks for the response Rick. In this case, I am not displaying any of the data. It is a login page, so if data exists - continue to next page else make the user try a different login. I am more of client/server developer, so I am used to message boxes popping up everywhere. I guess displaying the message in label is a good enough. I actually got that to work pretty quickly, but was having problems getting a messagebox to appear. I figured it should be standard and easy to do. I wanted to use ado.net to query the data, so I couldn't use javascript or vbscript to display the messagebox. For some reason, the messagebox on the validationsummary control won't show up unless it is tied to another validation control. I even created my own validation summary control and still had the same problem. At least I learned a few things. Anyway, thanks for the help, I appreciate it.