Hi jdegeorge,
I'm not sure what you're really trying to achieve here, but one thing at a time.
Where (that is, in what code) are you trying to set the focus to a field. I don't personally like this but if you set the focus to another field you don't want focused and then set it back to the field you do want it may well work. The reason for this seems to be that setting the focus works fine but you are often thwarted by Access then setting it somewhere else before the screen is redisplayed; setting it twice seems to tell Access that you really mean it and it doesn't then override your wishes.
Now, you don't need to set the focus to a field to assign a value to it so you must be doing it simply because you know thaat TABbing from it produces the result you want. That is a bit dangerous as design changes could change the effect of TABbing. Wouldn't it be better to do what you want directly which sounds like going to a new record in a form - from memory it's something like DoCmd.gotorecord ,,acnewrec.
Enjoy,
Tony