Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle!  When I take the checkmark off of "all day event", the reminder time does, indeed, change to my default setting.  This is obviously a change in behavior from Outlook 2000 which simply defaulted to the options setting regardless of all day or not.  Now that I see how it works in 2003, I'd say it's a nice little feature.  On the other hand, I suppose I could complain that MS should have also added a way to set the default reminder time for all day events.  Let's say I want it to be 1 day - is there a way to change it?