" i'm going back to excel where humans are a natural part of the landscape"
oh don't give up on Access yet! You are right that many things are easier to do in Excel -- but here is where knowing when to use Excel and when to use Access is important.
If you change data and that causes the dLookups to get different values, you may just need to save the record to get them to refresh. On the AfterUpdate event of each of the source controls:
"dirty" is a form property that gets set to TRUE if a record has changes that need to be saved
if me.dirty then
is the same thing as
if me.dirty=True then
me.dirty = false
~~~~~~~~~~
if this doesn't do the trick, post the ControlSource for the controls that aren't getting the values updated