Wish I could help, but haven't really done anything with DLookup in the stuff I built for our lab. I agree Access and VBA can be extremely frustrating at times, but it's still a nice little database program for some applications. Also nice that you can "upgrade" the data to something else like SQL Server when the need finally comes, and hang on to your front end stuff.
I found a pretty decent forum for help at:
http://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/index.php