>Let me ask you this (or any one else who is lurking), if a date field in a VFP free table is 8 places wide, is that 6 digits and 2 slashes? Or is it 8 digits and no slashes?

The dates are stored in a FoxPro table as a string in "YYYYMMDD" format. It doesn't matter if it's free table or it belongs to DBC.