Much as I hate posting chunks of code, this seems to answer the question exactly
This is swagged direct from the vb newsletter from
SELECT ENTRIES QUICKLY IN A DROP-DOWN COMBO BOX
In combo boxes with many entries, the user often needs a way to quickly pick an entry. One way to accomplish this in VB6 is to provide a combo box that selects entries as the user types letters. This allows the user to narrow the list of items that they need to search.
To implement this, use the SendMessage API call and the CB_FINDSTRING message. First, place a combo box on a form. Set the style to 0--Dropdown Combo. Then add the following to the declarations section of the form:
Private Declare Function SendMessage Lib "user32" Alias _
"SendMessageA" (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal wMsg As Long, _
ByVal wParam As Long, lParam As Any) As Long
Private Const CB_FINDSTRING = &H14C
Add the following code to the Form_Load event to populate the combo box:
Call Combo1.AddItem("Baker"

Call Combo1.AddItem("Barber"

Call Combo1.AddItem("Barker"

Call Combo1.AddItem("Berkley"

Call Combo1.AddItem("Brown"

Call Combo1.AddItem("Carter"

Call Combo1.AddItem("Davis"
Next, add the following code to the Combo1_KeyPress event:
Dim lngRow As Long
Dim strSearchText As String
'Only process key if it is a character
If KeyAscii < 32 Or KeyAscii > 127 Then
Exit Sub
End If
If Combo1.SelLength = 0 Then
strSearchText = Combo1.Text
Else
strSearchText = Left(Combo1.Text, Combo1.SelStart)
End If
strSearchText = strSearchText & Chr(KeyAscii)
lngRow = SendMessage(Combo1.hwnd, CB_FINDSTRING, -1, ByVal
strSearchText)
If lngRow > -1 Then
Combo1.ListIndex = lngRow
Combo1.SelStart = Len(strSearchText)
Combo1.SelLength = Len(Combo1.Text) - Combo1.SelStart
End If
KeyAscii = 0
This code gets the current text from the combo box based on the selected text. It then calls the SendMessage API call, passing the hWnd of the combo box, the CB_FINDSTRING constant, -1 (to indicate that all rows should be searched), and the text to find. The return is the index of the matching row, or -1 if there was an error.
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