never mind... :P I thought I was being all smart and agile and everything and checked out a copy of my source from my svn repository into a new directory for my live site. Well it seems that I got some old classes that I thought I''d deleted from svn hiding in a sub directory of my models directory. When I dumped the Volunteer object from my controller it was obvious it was a whole different object. Deleting it cleared things up. -Tom