Lowell,
The problem I was having with the Staff table was that every time a record was added and saved, the 2 generated fields by the trigger were blank, which to me means the trigger wasn't firing.
I'm going to setup a test environment that hopefully duplicates my customers environment and see if I can duplicate the issue. If I can't, then I'm going to assume it must be an issue with the SQL 2008 express on their server.
thanks again for the help, much aprreciated.
Kevin