Thanks for the response. Your suggestion to do a subselect however doesn't quite meet my requirement due to the order in which the queries are executed. I'm wanting to have a user open a task screen, enter text into an extension field, hit an action button, and have the contents of the field saved and displayed in the Task History. However, it appears that the extension field data is written to the database AFTER the 'Insert Task History' query is run, meaning that the field text is not written to history. Unless of course you action the task a second time.
On a side note, if one wanted to use these shared fields via a .js file, would the only way be to use your suggestion? ie. use the DB object to get the data? The colon also causes problems in Javascript.
Thanks