Thanks for all the suggestions. I was thinking about explicitly stating that I did not seek an alternative approach to the numeric conversion issue; rather I want to understand WHY the On Error GoTo statement does not work a 2nd time. It is now even more bothersome because of the claim that "Resume GetNum" works, but "GoTo GetNum" does not.

The initial problem and screwy behavior of On Error encouraged me to rethink the basic approach and I had already tried the "IsNumeric" check before I posted to this forum. That partially solved the problem, but further investigation led to other issues. I will probably end up writing my own version of IsNumeric to handle the numeric cases like 7/8 that the standard version can not. But that does not answer the fundamental question.