Are they the same as far as the first ten characters go, or are there invalid characters that would force VFP to revert to underscores?

For example, if column 1 is named "col one" and column 2 is named "col two", is it possible Foxpro is trying to name them both "col____"?

Try renaming the columns with completely distinct names less than ten characters, and no spaces, and then if that makes an openable DBF, put the original column headers back one by one until it throws the error again...

Automation is pretty slick, though, and plenty fast for small sets of data. If you need more than that, you can also try ODBC or the VFP OLE provider -- I have had nice success with those, and they are a bit faster than automation (and don't require an instance of Excel to work, I don't believe...)

Thanks,
JoeK