Thank you for your response and idea however, I would like to keep this map totally dynamic, so the leader annotation won't really work for me.

The line connects with the true point of the feature. If you have very large point symbols, you'll have the problem you are having where the line goes into the center of the symbol. Ideally, the leader would attach to the outside of the marker, but that is not as easy for us to calculate on-the-fly as it sounds.

The other option I can think of is to put the marker as a decoration at the end of the leader line and draw it on top of the line.

Hi thanks a lot for your response and idea. I tried to copy my layer,un-label this copy, and place the copy above my labeled layer in the TOC (to in-effect put my marker symbols on top the label compenents). This didn't work either. What would solve this problem I think would be an ablility to control the draw order of dynamic labels and their components across layers. From what I can tell Maplex priority ranking doesn't cover this level of detail. My symbols are not super big like you suggest. This is a 36x48 wall map and my absolute scale is 1:31200. this overstrike issue very noticable in paper space and on plots; when your in dataview and zoomed into a large scale, then no, it's not noticable. Aileen, I would definitley be interested in finding out how to attach a marker symbol to the end of a dynamic leader line on a dynamic label, that sounds like a cool trick. Thanks