That gives me the following error.
Warning: sprintf() [function.sprintf]: Too few arguments in C:\wamp\www\rockinCom\index.php on line 97
Query was empty
This may help to clarify a bit - here's the sql from the dreamweaver recordset view. colname is the parameter and I've added % to the end of it. There's no error but it will only return a result if there is only a single word in the parameter.
SELECT DISTINCT Category
FROM products
WHERE Category LIKE colname%
ORDER BY Category ASC