Gerry,

The only limit is memory. try this in the command window:

x = replicate( "a", 1024 )
x = x + x
? len(x)

rerun the last two lines over and over. At 8 meg my system with 64 meg phyical ram that's been running all day, (with OE and IE4 so I'm sure the swap file was already huge anyway *g*) started doing a lot of disk thrashing.

>I use an edit box and a memory variable to monitor incoming messages in my application. Is there a practical limit to the length of the sting in the character variable, and what happens if you exceed it ?