I just tried this Craig and it seems to work for the first problem. The conflict which stops you moving samples only occurs if either the location or spatial ref values conflict, so if you have a survey event with the date & recorders you need, but with neither location nor spatial ref fields completed, but with something in location name instead, then you can at least drag and drop all the samples into your new event, regardless of what spatial ref information the samples include.

Thats a workaround and useless for a large dataset, but it might give you clues as to where to go next. I would imagine it would be possible to create a batch update which would merge all the samples into one event without going via Recorder's protection routines.

John, it seems to me that the ability to import the sample spatial information and that of the event seperately would do the trick. Could the events not be grouped by either location or location name?

On a related issue, would it be possible for the import wizard to search for pre-existing events and/or samples to add occurrences to.

We have been importing some huge datasets recently, mainly of fungi and lichen records and we have found it more practical to import a few thousand (up to about 20-30,000) at a time. Since the tables being imported have been sorted by species name, different chunks of the dataset have contained occurences which were collected in the same sample, but each generate a new event and sample, this has created a very fragmented hierarchy with many duplicate events (or at least we assume that is how it has happened). I realise that sorting the data by location and date  would solve this, if we remember to do it each time, but surely it would be better if the software could handle this automatically.

A refinement of the same problem is that many of these records have an association with a tree species and the import creates a new record of that species for each associated lichen or fungus record. I have seen samples in which there are twenty or more Oak records, all of which share the same location, spatial ref, date and recorders. One consequence of this is that data we exchange with our vascular plant county recorder appears to contain 12,000 duplicate records (at least 9000 of these are plants associated with fungi. One record associated with all the fungi would be tidier.