Sergey, thanks very much. I think you've put me on the right track. However, I do get an error.

With your suggestion I modified the original VB routine to what's below to work in VFP:

oXMLHttp = CREATEOBJECT("Microsoft.xmlhttp")   && from Sergey/Univ Thread

* prepare the HTTP POST request
oXMLHttp.open("POST", "https://wwwcie.ups.com/ups.app/xml/rate", .F.)
oXMLHttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded")
* send the request
*oXMLHttp.send requestString
USE holdxml IN 0
SELECT holdxml
GO top
oXMLHttp.send(holdxml.holdxml)

Holdxml is a memo field in holdxml.dbf which holds an XML document for access (access code, user name, password) and an XML document which is a sample rate request from the UPS documentation. When the send method is executed I get a program error: 'OLE IDispatch exception code 0 from msxml3.dll: Access is denied.' Assuming I have correct access info in the first XML document, I'm thinking that denial of access is due to the memo field's not being a proper XML format. (It's pure text.) Is that a possibility?

Thanks again for your help.