Well, as i see it, the select in the CTE orders the bids by amount in descending order. ROW_NUMBER with PARTITION BY AucID groups them together by AucID and assigns...

Jeff it works! I made the following changes so that i can merge it into one line and use it in a classic asp page. It might be more efficient...

Jeff, thanks for the reply! As you no doubt noticed, I'm new here. I'll try you solution after church today.

I just realized that I posted this in the wrong forum as my server version is 2005. I'm copying to to what I hope is the right one.