>>>Do you really think that parsing the file will be significantly faster than a ADO to VFP routine?
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>>Absolutely! +50 seconds to convert 3 meg of data from recordset to VFP cursor via VFPCOM. The .Save method dumped the 3 meg in about 2 seconds. VFP's append is fast as well. All I need now is an efficient routine to convert the saved recordset to a flat file. Since my source data is strictly character and numeric field types that looks to be a simple conversion. The ADO output file looks to be fairly straight forward, but I would like to find some info on the file header. I would expect when all is said and done that the total conversion will be in the 10-15 second range. The time savings should grow significantly with larger datasets.
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>I believe that ADO 2.1 can save to XML, which is a text file. It should be easy to go from there to VFP cursor.

An educated guess: a 3 meg ADO recordset will translate into a MUCH larger XML set because of the repetitive tags needed for XML. The extra space could translate into extra processing time. I think even a tab delimited text file would be much more efficient.