Mr. B, Have you considered writing custom objects to wrap your tables as opposed to using strongly-typed DataSets? While convenient, they're heavy, and they do have particular requirements and limitations. Custom objects can be as large or small as your requirements dictate, and although you'll need to make updates to the objects as you change the schema and so on, it's far less painful than DataSets if done properly.
I would recommend you look at any of Dino Esposito's books, in particular "Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise (PRO-Developer)" which is available from Amazon for about 30 bucks. He discusses a lot of design patterns in that book for handling custom object-based data layers, data transfer objects, and so on. The focus I believe is primarily SQL Server, but Access in this case can easily be treated as fairly identical for the purposes of your work. Beyond that, I would also suggest reading up on the topic of database design. "Beginning Database Design" by Churcher (~$30 on Amazon) is a well-reviewed book that would likely make a good starting point. If you adequately design your database at the beginning, the application will run better, your maintenance tasks will be reduced (if not altogether eliminated) and you won't have so many of these development headaches. Hope that helps! Alan http://www.twitter.com/anachronistic
