Thanks for your feedback. I made the change to the method, making it Protected as well as Public. I'm still getting the 2 errors, not sure why since we are talking about 1 IMPORTS statement and 2 stateements consisting of SqlConnection and SqlCommand. I think there is something else causing these 2 errors, but I don't know what. Unless I hear otherwise, I'll start a new project, limiting the inital coding to these 3 statements (IMPORTS and SQLxxxx) . . . don't know what else to do. Any other suggestions? Thanks again for your help.