On the online help for StrComp it says for the COMPARE setting of vbDatabase Compare, the following

"MS Access only. performs a comparison based on information in your database."

What does this mean?

check out the following MS Knowlwedge Base article

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;98227

Additionally, the following article talks about the "New Database Sort Order" setting within Tools, Options, General, New Database Sort Order" which correponds with the next comment on this thread.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;279401

I think its something to do with what country, or more correctly which language you use. For example Chinese would sort differently.

There are several different compare options, you should be able to read about them in the help file.

From experience I can tell you that the database compare option has the following annoying affect which took me ages to rectify. I was checking case against capital letters, A, B, C, D, but lower case letters worked as well, which i didn't want. I found the solution was to change the compared option to binary compare, my routine then rejected lower case letters.

Thanks Guys.