50k records should load almost instantaneously if the form is based on a
single table, and there are indexes on the appropriate fields for selecting
the records/sorting.

Loading 50k records into a combo is *really* bad idea, though. Alternatives
might be to use a text box instead of the combo, or to delay loading the
combo until the user has entered 3 or 4 characters, so there will never be
more than a few hundred records in the combo's RowSource. For details of
this technique, see:
Combos with Tens of Thousands of Records
at:
[url]http://users.bigpond.net.au/abrowne1/ser-32.html[/url]

--
Allen Browne - Microsoft MVP. Perth, Western Australia.
Tips for Access users - [url]http://allenbrowne.com/tips.html[/url]
Reply to the newsgroup. (Email address has spurious "_SpamTrap")

"tim" <tschur@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:096e01c34a21$90f72cc0$a601280a@phx.gbl...
> I'm loading a form (in continous form view) with about
> 50,000 records sorted by various criteria in Access 2002.
> It takes about a minute to run the SELECT statement in the
> form's recordSource on our slower computers, which is bad
> enough. In addition to this, however, the recordset for a
> combo box lookup also has to load, which takes another
> minute or so.
>
> Is there any way to have the same Select statement
> generate both the form recordset and the combo box
> recordset? Maybe this is a stupid question, but it seems
> like it shouldn't have to run the same SELECT statement
> twice.
>
> thanks,
> tim