Hi, all done now, made a heap of changes but the change that seemed to clinch it (seems obvious now) was taking my code out of the valid event and putting it inot click() and lost focus. Thanks for your help.

Sarah

by the way propmgr is a parameter so the form knows which fields to hide or show.

>Is PROPMGR (the string you pass to FIND) the form with the combobox that asks whether the user wants to close it or not? (I'm guessing.)
>
>If the tables aren't getting closed, maybe your form is not really getting released. You may have inadvertently left some variable references out there to it or an object on it.
>
>ps You really should check the return value of TABLEUPDATE and put it in a transaction/end transaction.
>
>
>>Hi Nancy, I've answered your questions. Hope they might shed some light. So the combo box isn't likely to be the problem?
>...snip