>Thanks for the reply Alex. The VFP COM object provides a function which returns an encrypted string (using Craig's FLL) back to a VB.Net (2.0) program. To accomplish this feat the VFP app must declare a return data type to be compatible with .Net.

Ahh. I see. I'm not sure of the answer as all my ADO.NET stuff uses SQL Server 2000 exclusively (IOW I do not use COM and DBF).
I assume you use an OleDbConnection object. If you get the digest as text (BASE64), then it should come as a 'text' (memo) field, shouldn't it? How long are the digests? If they are short enhough, it could even be a varchar.