that was like what I saw in the text box that contained the table ID, however when I msgbox it I just got a line full of ????? and that is why I think the code I place on the form stop working, since there was no match or couldn't find the ID that matched ??????. Also that line of ??????? in the msgbox resulted from any ID, not just the first one

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Reply from Alex Hedley:

I'll have to do more testing but did you originally use this I'd as a foreign key to other tables?
If so how did you update these other tables.

Also how did you reach 10 billion records?
You say you ran out, what happened when you added a new record, did it show a message?