Hi Keith,
As always, there are different ways to do it (apart from the usual 'click the add' button). It really depends how convoluted you want to get!
Personally, I think a good balance might be to go with a variation of your 'dummy' record.
In the attached example (sorry, it's not customers but countries, but the principle is the same)
1. I add a country called '+' to my countries table
2. I add a tablegrid filter (country <> "+" (see screenshot1)) to exclude it from any displays where countries are listed (see screenshot2).
3. But any comboxes where I might want to add a country that isn't in the list, the "+" is available (see screenshot3).
Then if the user clicks the "+", it calls the approrpriate form when new details can be added.
All of the above works irrespective of whether you've made the combobox searchable or not.
A second option (very easy) is simply to replace the 'combobox add' button with something a bit less intrusive - in the attachment, you can also click on the 'Country' label (form2.label4) - it's underlined and the cursor changes to a hand-pointer to let the user know that there is functionality behind the label.
A final way might be to re-assign the 'right-click' but that gets pretty tortuous and I don't think the end result is any neater than the above.
Don't know if anyone else has different ways.
Derek.
kw combobox1.zip