no I see what you are saying. its funny because my test machine at home that has apache and php and mysql on it doesn't do that. if I have a last id of 10 and I delete it, the table will still insert #10, but on my site if I did that it would not increment the same.

so, if your table has an ID of 10, how is autoindex going to return 23? if the last id is 10 it should autoindex 11 not 23. if that is the last row in the table. but if you have anything higher than that higher up in the table it will return 23 or whatever.

1
3
23
5

even though the last id is 5 the next autoindex is 24. make sure you script doesn't do that as it will return 23 instead of 5