Thanks AIberto; John.
FYI, I dumped the notion of using the attribute prompts. As David had mentioned, if there is not perfect synchronization between attribute sequencing and the associated block def the prompting would be out of wack. Worse, if attributes instances are created completely independent of a block def, e.g. AutoCAD Electrical, prompts are not to be realized.
The program in my original post was modified accordingly. It still sorts the attributes from top to bottom, left to right, but displays the tags instead of the prompts, thus should work on any insert with attributes, regardless how the attributes were birthed.
Cheers.