So, looking into the forms a bit more I just realized that what I did with the clients table I need to do with the projects table.
In the client table I had a field for location and at the same time had a foreign key for the country table. If I understand this correctly, having both defeats the purpose of having the country table and therefore the countryid fk in the client table. So that's why I replaced the location field with the country id field.
The same is happening in my project table. I have a project type field as well as a milestone amount field. I have two respective tables for project types and milestone amounts which I use to fill the menu list on the form. I'm thinking about replacing the first two mentioned fields with their respective fk fields.
I think these replacements and the use of the fk are at the root of the problem and am not sure if I'm over-thinking the table layout or I'm simply implementing the form wrong.
jc