Howdy, Bonnie-

Does the weather suck over there on the Eastside? Probably not. It's definitely winter over here by the Sound.

>PMFJI here ... I've barely used ASP.NET, so I'm not much of an expert in this area ... but I've gotta ask this: wouldn't it be easier to populate a DataSet with a DataAdapter and populate your Dropdown from the DataSet instead of using a DataReader? It's easy to persist the DataSet between postbacks.

Good question. Yes, that's an alternative, of course. In my simple mind, I have this guideline that says "use DataReaders for read-only data access for best performance." Personally I really love DataSets and DataTables, and have been impressed by their performance so far, but I had this idea that it was silly in this instance. So...Live and learn. Of course, I learn more by chosing the wrong approach than the right one, but it surely cuts in to billable hours. <s>