For the past week or two I have been getting apparently "impossible " behaviour from Access 365 ("Microsoft Access for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2501 Build 16.0.18249.2013 2) 64 bit"), running under Windows 11 24H2. The 24H2 update was successfully installed on 12/2/2025 and the strange behaviour has been occurring approximately since then, but I can't be sure of the exact dates or whether there is a correlation. SFC does not find any integrity violations in Windows, and the issue has persisted across system reboots, Access Compact and Repair, and Decompile-Recompile.
I have a form, 'Form25', with a single subform, 'subfrm_EnterTe am' in Continuous Forms view. The subform has a single row of controls - 3 combo boxes, 2 text boxes and a button. The form and its subform have been working correctly for about 7 years, but I needed to add an additional field (column) to one of the combo boxes. I edited the SELECT statement in the Row Source and adjusted the Column Count and Column Widths accordingly. To my surpise, this made no difference to the dropdown; it still showed the original three columns, and the new column wasn't available to VBA in the AfterUpdate procedure.
Investigations showed that nothing I do to the Row Source makes any difference - even deleting it entirely.
I have gone back to front end backups over the last five years and found a further "impossible " behaviour: They all show the Row Source field for that combo box, and for one of the others, as being empty: the SELECT statement which was there originally is missing. Yes the subform works correctly, displaying the dropdowns as if the SELECT statement were still there.
[A few other obscure things have happened at the same time - for example, in the 5-year-old backup version I switched from Form view to Design view and back again without making any changes, but when switching back to form view Access couldn't open it, saying that the form's source query was missing. (It wasn't; in fact the form is built on a table, not a query). However, I haven't tried to investigate this. ("Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof").]
Can anyone figure out what might be going on, or what I can do about it? I'm afraid to do anything with it now, in case it runs amok and destroys my project!
I have a form, 'Form25', with a single subform, 'subfrm_EnterTe am' in Continuous Forms view. The subform has a single row of controls - 3 combo boxes, 2 text boxes and a button. The form and its subform have been working correctly for about 7 years, but I needed to add an additional field (column) to one of the combo boxes. I edited the SELECT statement in the Row Source and adjusted the Column Count and Column Widths accordingly. To my surpise, this made no difference to the dropdown; it still showed the original three columns, and the new column wasn't available to VBA in the AfterUpdate procedure.
Investigations showed that nothing I do to the Row Source makes any difference - even deleting it entirely.
I have gone back to front end backups over the last five years and found a further "impossible " behaviour: They all show the Row Source field for that combo box, and for one of the others, as being empty: the SELECT statement which was there originally is missing. Yes the subform works correctly, displaying the dropdowns as if the SELECT statement were still there.
[A few other obscure things have happened at the same time - for example, in the 5-year-old backup version I switched from Form view to Design view and back again without making any changes, but when switching back to form view Access couldn't open it, saying that the form's source query was missing. (It wasn't; in fact the form is built on a table, not a query). However, I haven't tried to investigate this. ("Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof").]
Can anyone figure out what might be going on, or what I can do about it? I'm afraid to do anything with it now, in case it runs amok and destroys my project!
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