>I am in the early design phase of a major application upgrade that is required to access VFP legacy data. I was initially planning to use vfpoledb instead of web services. I’m glad I stumbled upon this problem now rather than later. So vfpoledb is out, should I use VFP based web services with its depreciated soap specification?

You should probably check additional sources on this issue, but I would think that if your data is in DBF format, then keeping the data on a 32-bit server is best to allow access to it by remote sources via the VFP OLE DB provider. If you move your data to SQL Server 2005, then you will be able to run it on a 64-bit server.