Good luck OP! Hopefully everything goes smoothly for you.

skidooman, one might expect *A carriers to have no problem interlining, even on separate PNRs. However, I treat every non-standard bag check request as a "cross fingers and hope for the best" situation. For example, UA in IAD even refused to check my bag through IAD-ZRH-SIN earlier this year, despite that it was a UA award ticket on a single PNR. I had a ~12 hour connection in ZRH (IAD-ZRH on UA, ZRH-SIN on LX) and was planning to spend the day in the city, so I didn't want to deal with the checked bag. I pleaded with at least 5 different agents and must have heard a dozen different reasons why it was "impossible." Most blamed the long connection (though nobody gave the same maximum connection time that would have been OK) or "the computer," but one agent insisted that LX wasn't a *A carrier, and another said they were "not allowed" to hand-write bag tags any more. In ZRH, I walked off the UA flight to the nearest transfer desk, where the agent was completely dumbfounded. She said something like "of course you don't have to claim your bag here," made a phone call, hand-wrote 'SIN' on my UA bag claim check, and handed me my LX boarding pass. Sure enough, the bag appeared on the belt in SIN...