man you are right about the search. will get on that. thanks

Marty, I figured it out - works perfectly once you figure out the right stuff to enter!

still much better than State, Federal, sales taxes and capital gains back in the US&A.

SIN

well sorta!

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Some hosts have the minimum search index at 4 characters for MySQL, so it won't find any results on 3 character searches. You'll want to set the minimum character length for MySQL full text indexing to three.
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VOILA! done! it choked on three character searches TIL NOW. thanks for the troubleshooting help AS ALWAYS!!!! much appreciated. hard to find all this stuff myself!!!