>Am doing data conversions with VFP 9.
>
>Need to strip leading zero (or zeros) from a character field (and ONLY leading zeros), then convert to a numeric.
>
>VAL('00203') returns 23 instead of the desired 203
>VAL('2098') returns 298 instead of the desired 2098
>VAL('0298') returns the desired 298 ...

Like Boris, I'm not reproducing your results that you posted here. Is it possible you tried doing this first with STRTRAN and forgot to remove that code?