Thank you, Wendell, for your words of wisdom. As it turns out, Charlotte was spot-on — the variance was in the dashes, and nothing else! the reason that the name-building code in the one database seemed to run fine, was that it had _underscores_. I had put one line directly below the other, and compared the docmd.sql call section by section, and _still missed that! It must be the eyes and the small font … although, I would have expected that dashes would be okay — see my response to Charlotte. The name-building-code in the successful attempt that I just happened to do on Windows95 is without either dashes _or_ underscores — my only excuse is that my mind must have been thoroughly boggled by that time .

We have installed SR2. We have had some “inflexible” behavior w/ Access97 and Win2k, mostly excrutiatingly sloooooooow relinking of tables, and (for the couple of us that have the ability) excrutiatingly long times in popping up the properties of the database after the 1st or 2nd time (I wonder if there are other issues there other than Access97/Win2k, though). Also, Windows 2k refuses to load a database that exists on a Banyan network drive, but that’s probably not a “flukiness” issue, just one of moving away from backwards-compatibility. We only have a couple of databases still on our Banyan network. It’s a pain, none-the-less.

> On the other hand, we don’t recommend running Access2k on
> a Win95 PC. We’ve seen some strange things happen in that
> environment too. Just an FYI.

Thanks for the information. I’ll store this for future decision-making — I have discouraged us from upgrading to Access2k up ’til now for various reasons (mostly, “if it’s not ‘broke’ , don’t fix it,” and I guess I’m grateful that I did — except for the handful of us w/ Win2k machines where Access2k might have worked better, most are still on 95/98 machines.
Thanks so much for your input, Wendell! I have archived off several of your messages on other issues (as well as several from others). Yours are among the messages that I look forward to reading,
thx
Pat

Charlotte,

> I’m not surprised it failed, I’m surprised you ever got it
> to run. Once you actually generate the SQL, if you don’t
> but brackets around the destination table’s name, the

Thanks for looking at this for me — see my message to Wendell! I don’t know how I missed that the month-day-yr was separated by hyphens instead of underscores, which were present in the working copy (and which I had physically pasted one line below, to better compare if there was any difference in the strings … and the copy that I finally got working didn’t include either dashes _or_ underscores, and my brain was so blown as not to notice that glaring difference, by that time).
I checked what you suggested, and sure enough, putting the brackets around the bld with dashes, handles the problem. _However_ :
I would like to point out that Access help files only mention the need for brackets (that I can find) in the case of names w/ spaces. I see, though, that the query builder grid (if you look at the SQL generated) automatically puts brackets around names that include dashes — which of course, I bypassed when I created it myself.
Thanks for your input! I appreciate this forum so much, and, as I’ve told Wendell, I’ve archived your messages, his, Marks, as well as other people’s. Thanks so much to all you who shape the Lounge!

Pat