This is a known bug in Delphi 5 and will be fixed. It seems to only happen with queries. Using persistent fields will make it worse. Here is a good workaround which was posted on the borland newsgroup. It requires editing and recompiling the file 'dbctrls.pas' which comes with Delphi.

First find the file 'dbctrls.dcu' on your machine. If you did a default install it should be at 'C:\Program Files\Borland\Delphi5\Source\Vcl'. Rename this to something like 'dbctrls_ORIGINAL.dcu' so you can get it back later if you want. Next start a new, blank application and open the file 'C:\Program Files\Borland\Delphi5\Source\Vcl\dbctrls.pas'. Add Dbctrls to the uses clause of the blank project. Find the definition for procedure TFieldDataLink.UpdateField; and change the code to the following. You may want to just comment out the code that is there in order to save it.

procedure TFieldDataLink.UpdateField; var TempField : TField; begin if Active and (FFieldName <> '') then begin if Assigned(FControl) then TempField := GetFieldProperty(DataSource.DataSet, FControl, FFieldName) else TempField := DataSource.DataSet.FieldByName(FFieldName); if TempField <> FField then SetField(TempField) else begin FField := NIL; SetField(TempField); end; end else SetField(nil); end;

Finally, save and Build All Projects (Projects menu). If you get an error that 'dbctrls.dcu' cannot be found then you need to go into Tools|Environment Options|Library and add the path C:\Program Files\Borland\Delphi5\Source\Vcl (or whatever your actual path to the Vcl directory is) to the Library Path.

Now you should be able to compile and create a new 'dbctrls.dcu' file, and your data-aware controls should be updating.