Thanks however I'd prefer more basic onces than these. I'd also prefer NOT to get a second mortgage on the house for a few images. Surely there are some basic icons / collections we can download for free......

Thinking about it I guess it is behaving as expected. ie: when leaving the control the validating routine runs and when it fails the action to move elsewhere is aborted through the e.cancel. So with this in mind I have moved the code to different events such as "TextChanged" and "Leave" BUT for some reason the errorprovider only displays on some occasions rather than all. Typically on the first time I enter an invalid value (such as blank ""), the errorprovider doesn't display but if I create the same error it displays. This validation stuff is driving me Nuts !!!! What do you guys normally do to validate a whole bunch of controls on a page ? I would have thought validating field by field was more user friendly than waiting til the end and doing it, but as described in my example sometimes it isn't practical to force a user to stay on the control.

Good to see we are thinking on the same lines. I already tried it after I responded last, and it resolved the problem with one of the combo boxes but not the second one I am having problems with....but at least it is a start. Many thanks for your help. MArk

I know, from first hand experience. Whoops! :-> A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^] Dave Kreskowiak Microsoft MVP Visual Developer - Visual Basic      2006, 2007

Thanks so much for taking the time to elaborate on the topic. Mark

The way you have it does not allow nulls so you may just want to handle the exception msg 201 as a null parameter. The other way is to add a default @RateLevel1 money = NULL and have an output parameter @IsNull of type bit and set to true if any parameters are null.

No, and I don't want to either. It issues these errors when I hover over the "select fontname, fontsize....." In the old VBA I used to call the functions like: Dim Fontsize as integer fontsize = GetFontSize(strCurrentUser) ---- Function GetFontSize(CurentUser as string) as Integer ...... ...... ----- This meant I was able to use a single like to get my values and use them in lots of places easily. When I read I should store these server-side I was very happy. I just need to call the function and return it to my current sub easily without having to do too much coding to setup and call the function otherwise it defeats the purpose FYI I spent all weekend playing with the new error provider - very nice but it took me the longest time to work it out nicely....MS documentation is horrible....I found Google far better than MS own doccu... Mark

Thanks Duncan. I need to return some values and use them so I think the function would be best. Excuse my ignorance but my previous coding was for MSAcess so I"m trying to learn SQL server issues, and move from VBA to VB.NET. I have put in the SELECT statement you sugessted but the compiler tells me "Select CASE must end with a matching END SELECT", and hovering over FROM in the statement gives me "name not declared" . Obviously I need more code to setup the SQL statement - could you kindly give me an example please. Many thanks Mark