empty combo box

[julidy]

I have inherited an access 2003 database with 30 users that is responsible
for all of the product tracking for our publishing company. Today all combo
boxes stopped working that pull from one certain column in one table. This
is true through different forms, and even different versions of the front
end. The column in question is unfortunately the primary key for the largest
table in our database. All forms, tables, and queries can be opened without
any errors. I have tried creating new combo boxes, repairing/compacting the
database, and a few other things. Does anyone have any experience with this
sort of problem?

 

[Mr B]

Did your IS department recently install the SP3 for Access? This sounds
exactly the behavior that will happen if you have some format applied in the
table for a field.

We recently had a situation like this a at a company that I do some work
for. They quickly decided to roll back and remove the SP3 update. That
corrected the problem.

 

[Mr B]

I did find a link and some comments that might help:

Here is the link:
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...2646-4a38-bcbb-940298a9697c&lang=en&cr=us&p=1

Here is a comment by "ionic-fire" concerning this same issue:

Office 2003 SP3 - Access combo box problems - ionic-fire via
AccessMonster.com
25-Oct-07 04:53:41

I have also had this problem since SP3 was installed on Monday. Before
installation, my combo boxes worked just fine. After, I get blank combo boxes.


Following suggestion above, I just removed all formatting from fields in my
underlying tables which are used as lookup source for a combo box. This
worked! Now, my combo box actually displays what it needs to. The odd part is
that not all of the combo boxes were affected, only a few.....there seems to
be no obvious trend. And now, even with the DISTINCT predicate, the first
entry in the combo box list is a blank line, this was not there before. Any
ideas?

MS needs to fix this annoying little "bug". I wonder what other unknown
surprises that SP3 has in store.....

 

[julidy]

Yup, that did it. I found three instances where "<" was inserted in the
format settings for the field. Weird, I never would have figured that out.
Thanks!

 

[Mr B]

Your quite welcome.

Good luck with your project.

 

[S Haney]

Try the following link as well...
I had a similar problem and this seems to have fixed it.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945674/en-us

There is a download (hotfix) that will display your combo box items (no more
blank list even when the list is actually there).