Duh!

Beware that if you use the DataGrid it is ((not)) compatible with
unbound columns or rows!  Found this tidbit in MSDN after struggling
for a couple of days with high strangeness when trying to write to an
unbound column.  The symptoms lead to a delusional belief that you are
just coding something wrong, but in fact it's much more than that.

You can create an unbound column, and you can even set the Caption
property at runtime .... but you cannot set the Value or Text property
because of the incompatibility.  "Column not found", indeed.  You can
see it, you can type in it, you can even set the Caption, but the
column does not exist!

MSHFlexGrid seems to be ADO and unbound row/column compatible though.

Thanks to those who helped with this problem.  ~Paul

Yeah but MSHFlexGrid is read-only for bound data. Not good enough...
still struggling here.

rom.

It's read only??  Jeezuz.  No wonder people spend money on grid controls!