I would populate the combo in its Init event by doing the query and then using AddListItem to add the customers to the combo. I would also add a blank choice as the first item in the combo and make that the initially selected one. This would cause all other lists to be populated with nothing until the user changes the selection in the combo to a real customer. Of course you would need to adjust the record pointers in the when event of the combo because its Rowsource is not the customer table so the pointer does not automatically move.