dgunner71:
You have confused the issues here.
Control source is not the same as record source.
The two terms are NOT interchangable.
For the control source of any control on a form, you will be limited to either setting it to one of the fields of the form's record source or leaving it blank.
For a form, you may set this to a table, a stored query, or and embedded query. My choice depends on what I need to have happen; usually, I use a stored query. I will often embed the query in the record source of a form if I want to keep prying fingers from altering the query.
As for the combo/list box:
You need to understand the CombBox Object model.
ComboBox Object : ACC2010
Pay particular attention to the Control source, Rowsource, and bound column properties.
Once again; here for the rowsource, I often embed the query in the rowsource because I want to keep prying fingers from easily altering the query as I am often useing it as a bound lookup field; thus, the value returned absolutly has to be the correct entry for the field.
If you split the front and backends, I generally have the saved queries for the rowsource for the forms and controls in the frontend as these usually do not change; however these still need to access the backend tables to work so I don't think there's any performance gain.