Problem With Access Records Order

Hi,

I apologise if this has been posted in the wrong place.

I am currently making changes to a VB front end for a database of jobs in our company. we have approx 2000 job records in the job table. The program uses a recordset to move sequentially up or down the table, record by record as it searches.

The code is doing its job fine, but for some reason or another, the records in the database are not in order. They loosely follow the order you would expect from 1 to 2000, but every now and then deviates. Obviously, when pulling data out one record at a time, this gives the data in the wrong order.

I did not design the database. There was orignally no primary key or indexing. The new job number (an obvious choice for a primary key) is generated by the exectuable program.

I have spent hours trying to apply sorts in different ways, and reading about how records are stored, and my limited understanding has led me to believe that merely sorting records in access is not enough to change the order that they are physically stored in.

My coding abillity is not good enough code round this problem, and the ideal fix would be to find out some way of forcing an ordering from now on (ie would making job number and indexed primary key now prevent this happening to future records) and to find some way of re ordering the previous records (not just sorting them to be viewed in order).

Am I being really silly and missing something or is this a problem people have had before?

Thanks in advance,

Jamie