>So I fire up Access 2003 and do the File>Import thing with files of type dBase IV, and sure enough, it pulls them right in, no questions asked. So now I could bring them all into Access then from there into VFP, but I’ve got 19 sets of data, and each set has over 300 data files, and I’m too old to deal with all that before I die.
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>Anybody have any better ideas?

So if you can pull them from Access... does Access see the whole dataset or you have to import table by table? If it does see them all, then when you pull up a connection to the Access' .mdb (via ODBC from fox), there should be some SQL* function to find all the tables in the .mdb - ah, here it is, SqlTables(). Then you should be able to pull them one by one automatically, and then repeat the proces only 19 times. So you'd only have to do the import to Access manually - despite my convictions (lazy programmer of the 2nd kind), it's not worth automating.

If Access can import them only one table at a time... try to find a OleDb client for these tables. These should be freely downloadable.