splitting the dataflow with a multicast doesn't tell me that the update or insert was successful, and since there is no success output on the destination there is nothing to merge it back in with to only update the "stageFlag" on a successful update or insert.

I will attempt to understand and consider your other suggestion later.  Performance is a factor, of course.

In the meantime, I have unzipped the files I sent you and run the solution and it works just fine for me, too.  Which means to me that I probably do not have the offending code captured unless I moved it.  I had three versions from Friday that got deleted between 11:42 and 12:47 today (apparently) by something running on our network.