Hi Jeff

There are several variations on this little issue.

There's a valid case where the combo's Bound Column is not its display
column, and the RowSource is filtered in such a way that it does not have
the record it needs to display. (Given your experience, I doubt this is your
issue.)

Access does have some serious display problems where a form returns no
records (not even the new record), and so the Detail section goes completely
blank. In this case, it becomes bamboozled about any controls in the Form
Header or Form Footer. More info and a sample:
   Incorrect display of data
at:
   http://allenbrowne.com/bug-06.html

There is also a timing bug in Access where it fails to display the data
correctly after a requery. This occurs in all versions of Access, but only
in combos where the bound column is not the display column. If the combo is
selected, the selection may even be the width of the characters, but the
characters are not visible. I don't know how to prevent this. A Requery in
Form_Current won't do it (seems to be too early.)

There was one quirky workaround that involved placing a text box over (or
was it partially behind?) the combo, which seemed to affect the way Access
updates the screen. Can't recall if you had to set the Transparent property
to get this to work.

It's darned annoying. The only real workaround I know of is not to make the
combo's bound column the first visible column. For example, intead of a
lookup table like this:
   CategoryID    AutoNumber
   Category       Text
use:
   CategoryID    Text
   SortOrder      Number
The foreign key is then a Text field, so you don't hide it, so the problem
doesn't occur.

HTH