Strange problem with MS Access DB and chinese chars

Hi, I'm studying/learning chinese language.

I created at home in my PC a MS Access DB, where I've been storing all I was learning, each record have different fields I typed: one I typed in RPC (simplified chinese), another one I typed in Pinying (kind of "latinized" chars, to sound as "figured pronounciation"), one typed in Spanish/English.

So far, so good, I had no problems: each field always looked great.

Queries, Reports, etc all looked great.

BUT...

Obviously many words/chars were repeated thru many records.

Then I created another query (to find out single chars I should easily recognize)

SELECT DISTINCT Diccio.Pri

FROM Diccio

ORDER BY Diccio.Pri;

Where Diccio is the main table, and Pri is just a small field I had got/updated in each Diccio record, with just one single chinese ideogram (character) extracted from the chinese text part of that record.

Nice: the results displayed was a list of about 600 ideograms (one for each record).

Then I tought: well, if I could have this same list as a new table (just one ideogram per record...), I could use it to build JOINs with the Diccio table, etc.

Here started my problems:

I went back to the Query I mentioned above, changed it to get same results to a new table (Query type of "Create New Table") and populated a new table, with same number of records as the "about 600"I mentioned.

Great !

Went to check it ... and ... My God, some of the 600 expected records had the expected ideogram... but many of the records were interleaved (without any logic) with many blank records... to the 600 number. !!!

Obviously, I repeated everything several times... It had no sense at all.

The query would display correct results, but running the modified query to create a new table was writing the same number of records, but MANY of them, most, were BLANK!!!

What was happening?

I must admit I've spent many many hours digging into Access documentation, the fact chinese text is writen using double-char set, how Access will "compress" its text data (Unicode Compression), etc, but was not lucky to understand what was happening.

Today, JUST BY CHANCE, I happenned to find a solution!!!

BUT it's NON SENSE...

-first I'd like to understand why things work so extremely wrong (my opinion)

-second, want to tell everybody, just in case someone else runs into the same problem.

Well, just as I mentioned, I was looking at the contents of the new table, full of blank records interspersed with some good records... and thought of "manually writing"on one of those recods the chinese char (ideogram) it should have shown...

As I was typing it, I just saw a very small pixel that suddenly disappeared.

Tried it again, the same happenned.

The column with the 600 records with field length of just 1... had a charwidth of 10...

That's a normal charwidth size ... for just 1 char field.

So, I changed it to 30 !!!...
and suddenly ALL RECORDS SHOWED FILLED with the ideograms they were supposed to show !!!

You can figure out my surprise!!!

I reduced the charwidth back to 10... and the data still showed correct!!!

What was happening? It CAN'T be true!

Most records were previously showing blank...

Just changing charwidth fixed the problem???

Went back to original width of 10, and every record would still show the correct data ????

It CAN'T be true!!!

So I recreated the problem several times. Everytime I run the query that creates the new table, its records show, most of them, blank. Some few, interspersed, with the expected ideogram.

Then I change charwidth for the whole column to 30, everything is fixed. All records show OK.

I can change width back to 10, or any other value... records show correct from then on!!!

So, what have I been doing wrong? Can MS Access display table data wrong (should say VERY WRONG data), and that can be fixed just by changing its width size to a larger size, then back to the original, and now evrything is correct and working as expected????

Don't know if anybody ever run into this same situation: if so, please can you explain what is the reason for this strange behavior?

If not, I hope this lengthy explanation helps anybody else in the future...

Thanks,