I am trying to get a list of active volunteers for a particular program.   In my query I have "volunteer type status = active" and then parameters more specific to the program.  My problem is that, despite asking for only active volunteers, I am getting all the inactive ones as well.  Can anyone tell me why this is happening?

Are you using an AND operator between volunteer type status and paramater?  If you query on volunteer type status = active OR paramater = x you'll get inactive volunteers who meet the conditions of the parameter.  Similarly, if you have more than one paramater your query should look like this:

volunteer type status = active AND (parameter a = x OR parameter b = x OR parameter c = x)

Leslie