Hello All, I have it fixed, the OLEDB driver on my dev machine was version 7.0.0.9262 - and 9.0.0.??? something or other on my live machine, the other very noticeable difference between the two is the perfromance, the version 7 driver is almost 8 times faster retrieving my data - I thought I had a bottleneck somewhere on the network , but on trying to solve the date problem cured both, anyone know why version 9 is sooooo slow ? ( I'm talking 8 seconds to retrieve one record !! )is there a setting somewhere - (SET SPEED OFF?) thanks