Hey jmmach

I am a complete noob to this and I have been researching a different problem but I did read that:
you can omit fields in your query so long as the data definition in your table for these fields (i) allows Null values and (ii) specifies a default value in the table definition.

Don't know how sound this is but I'll pass it on to give you something to check.
Best of luck - this SQL is very unforgiving!

Barry