Al,

Thanks for the excellent summary. I saw the Devart option, the $2K SEE license and the .NET support which comes in its own dll rather than the ODBC driver.

One solution would be to recompile Christian's ODBC driver with one of the open source encryption addons (of which there are several) but ODBC compilation and even C familiarity are unusual competencies these days!

It's amazing that other vendors (and Google itself) cheerfully use and promote a database format that's immediately legible to anybody who gains physical access. Presumably they all roll their own security on top. I suspect this is another of those "VFP's strength is its weakness" moments: if you're used to manipulating data by a series of method calls and objects rather than Requery() / Tableupdate() etc, there's no huge downside to substituting a different assembly to gain encryption... I suppose you could do this in VFP Compiler too by rolling the encryption C code into the app's data access methods, as long as you use data access methods rather than direct requery() etc. Theoretically you could do away with ODBC as well if you went down this route, but it's a shame to have to reinvent this sort of wheel.