Have you opened your address book *wab file in Notepad to compare it with Autocomplete.
One should be able to see how each field is field of data is stored and find a section for each category. The names are most likely grouped together, email addresses, and so on. Since OE's address book has less available columns(categories) than allowable records(rows) storing a column of data is probably quicker than storing rows.

I suspect that Autocomplete recall might function differently than the Address book storage method.
..winston

"GO" wrote in message ...
: I've just been playing around with the auto-complete and I may have
: uncovered how it works. It appears that one (and primary) search path is
: based on the age of the record/contact. That is, whatever contact was
: created first will be the first to show up as the auto-complete entry.
: Example: if I were to enter a contact "Bob (work)" and then a second entry
: "Bob (home)", "Bob (work)" would show up first when I start entering "Bob"
: in the To field. I'm assuming this is a result of how the Address Book
: (.wab) file is stored. They are probably stored like a text file with new
: entries at the bottom and when OE needs to query the address list it starts
: from the top down. I'm not 100% sure on this but it certainly seems like
: the case. Can anyone confirm this?