>In some places I am using an odbc connection to the vfp tables and using the SQL server import function to import the data, If I set this setting then replace all the fields with themselves in the vfp tables will this strip out the spaces when I use the SQL server import function ?

No, it only has effect when table is created. If you want to truncate trailing spaces in varchar fields you'll have to replace each field with RTRIM() of that field.