Dmitry,

No this is probably not something weird, it is probably that the & is a reserved character in VFP that does macro expansion even whne it is inside of quotes. So how do you deal with it? You break up your strings into pieces a=that keep the & from ever being next to another character as in;

lcVar = STRTRAN(lcMyOtherVar, "&" + "amp;", "&" + "new;")

This way you never run into a problem becasue there is variable named amp somewhere and VFP tries to macro the varaiable when it sees "&".

As an example try running this code;

amp = "My best work"
? "&"