Sorry, I was misreading the original post. I was thinking more along the lines of pairwise scheduling, like for certain sports, where every team in the league plays each week, and plays each team exactly once.
This is a much different problem. It sounds like something Erdos would have worked on.
I know this wont help you, but could you point me at some info regarding the problem?
party on,
shemp
Comment on Re: Re: Re: Lunch Bunch arrangement problem
I did a lot of digging around for ideas for this problem in the Wolfram Mathworld pages http://mathworld.wolfram.com. Some of the subjects I looked at were: Euler squares, Kirkman's Schoolgirl Problem, Block Design, and Finite Field.