>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.
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>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.

Access can only import one table at a time short of using some VBA script. I considered your approach too, Dragan. Unfortunately, the 19 sets are from different versions of the software over the last ten years, and the data structure changes somewhat from one to another.

However, I've got a better answer now. Craig was right, and his comment prompted me to dig a little further with the ODBC approach. I used Mark McCasland's VPF ODBC class to create a full-blown DSN and then used that in SQLCONNECT and SQLEXEC, and it worked! So now I can write a procedure in VFP using ADIR() to loop through all the tables in a set and pull them into Fox.

I still don't understand why SQLSTRINGCONNECT() with the ODBC driver failed.