Coupla questions Ken,

What benefits does the option at point 1 above do for me?

And, how did you go about simplifying the underlying sql statement itself.  I'm kinda learning at this...

Guys, thanks.  I can't test on the live db but Farrell's 'virtual data' with the solution works perfectly, a little sluggish on the machine at home but I guess it'll...

Thanks for your help, I finally chose to write a simple vba routine in access to cycle thru the _temp table and run a delete row by row against the...

This is it:

delete from nsturesults n inner join _temp t on n.setid = t.setid and n.groupid = t.groupid and n.studentid = t.stuid where n.setid = '2006-07' and n.deptid = 'ma'...

With the fixing of a couple of minor typos, it did in fact work and produced exactly the goods desired.  Also moved the hardcoded criteria out, they were only a...

It'd be great if the field was huge, but I have no control and the interface app 'validates' the db everytime you logon, checking all tables, fields etc.  If it...

It works a charm with the braces - why are they so important?  I do have access rights to all base tables.

For a follow up is there any way to...