>Now - honestly - none of these would account for the bad character error you're seeing unless you are dealing with binary data in a memo field. That'll fail as soon as CHR(0) is encountered I think. I believe XmlAdapter deals with binary data a little more gracefully.

If the memo (or char field) is marked with NOCPTRANS in fox, even the 2.0 engine works fine, as it then treats the string as binary, and packs it in base64 format inside CDATA delimiters. Worked like that since VFP7 (that's about what, 12-13 years now), no problem.