So this is what I'm doing that does work. Yes, it's a single line of code, but it's cumbersome to type and I keep thinking back to not reusing code over and over when I can separate it out into a function.
lstItem.text = IIf(IsNull(rs!strProcStep), "", rs!strProcStep)
So I've tried to break that off into a function like so:
lstItem.text = SafeInsert(rs!lngIntID) . . . Private Function SafeInsert(Item As String) As String If IsNull(Item) Then SafeInsert = "" Else SafeInsert = Item End If End Function