>You still haven't said how you determine the file is 200,000 bytes. Where does that number come from?

This is from Windows Explorer, right click on the file and Size. This is the same amount of bytes return in VFP LEN(FileToStr(lcFile)). The file is ANSI encoding. When it it saved, it is still ANSI encoding. So, the stream preserves the proper encoding. However, I am loosing a big amount of bytes on that one. This is very rare. We only discovered that on some very rare occasions.