Cetin:
In the course of doing other things since I posed this question, I discovered that the problem lay in the fact that an SQL pass-through string I had created actually was so long (and yet in itself still worked and produced correct results) that it's shear size overwhelmed the debugger's ability to visually 'appear' to trace the rest of the related code even though the rest of the code steps happened invisibly - behind the scenes so to speak - just as intended.

Once I reduced the SQL string length - which I initially did deliberatly to produce a different result - then suddenly the debugger once more correctly performed tracing just as it is supposed to do. End of mystery.

Thnx for attempting to help solve this mystery. /psb