>I'm looking at SQL Server data using an ODBC connection and I see a square box (carriage return?) between each letter of text. Why is this happening? I've looked at data in other memo fields and it looks fine. Does this have something to do with unicode (which I'm not familiar with)?

It would happen when a column in SQL Server has type nchar, nvarchar or ntext, which is Unicode. VFP9 has new SYS(987) function that allows to map Unicode to ANSI. In VFP8 you can use STRCONV(6) to convert Unicode.