>Thanks, Sergey. Outlying date values were definitely the bulk of the problem in this instance. But why does a date value < 01/01/1753 generate an error message about character values? That was misleading...

Hi Lynda,

The SQL Server doesn't have special delimiters for datetime literals, like in VFP. The datetime literals can eaither be represented as string or as numeric values. I guess, VFP data type is converted to a string and passed to SQL Server as a part of INSERT command. You can use SQL Profiler to see what is actualy sent to SQL Server from VFP or any other source.