>> The company I work for uses PowerBuilder and it has some weak areas and thats why I wanted to use VFP but I'm screwed if I can't figure out how to fix this error.

Can you convert to using a varchar datatype on ORACLE?

I guessing that the trailing spaces are the extra spaces that VFP stores. If you put 'DOG' into a VFP c(6) column, you'll get 'DOG' with three spaces appended to the end.

-Mike