I suspect that all of you have figured this out by now... but just in case - here is the information that I have collected about the ODBC problems that are cropping up. This was finally tracked down by following an Access thread in the Microsoft knowledgebase. Even the "paid" Microsoft support was not able to offer suggestions after 7 days and counting. I hope this is of some use to somebody.

1 MDAC 2.1: This is the "new" ODBC package from Microsoft - it is auto installed with VFP 6 Service Pack 3, Win98 SecondEdition, and MS Office 2000. The reference is Release Manifest for MDAC 2.1 @ www.microsoft.com/data/mdac21info/mdac21gamanifest.htm.

2 The above can cause of variety of problems - all of my experience is with Word mailmerge files that access Foxpro tables - these are the potential error messages: "The Microsoft FoxPro driver is no longer supported, and has been replaced by the Microsoft Visual foxPro driver." Microsoft KB Article ID Q217013, "Could not find installable ISAM" Microsoft KB Article ID Q217013, or "ODBC--call failed" Microsoft KB Article ID Q231714.

3 Another iritation is that on some systems with Word97 installed when you attempt to create a new mailmerge document and select "Open Data Source" FoxPro Files has disappeared from the list of sources.

The "fix" that I have come up with depends on your particular problem:

1 If you are getting "ODBC--call failed" messages then you need the hotfix [MS terminology not mine] proposed in KB ID Q231714. It involves replacing the vfpodbc.dll on the affected machines.

2 If you are getting the other 2 listed problems or FoxPro Files has disappeared from your Word date source list - you can fix the problem with an addition to the Windows registry. This fix is NOT FROM Microsoft - so buyer beware - but it worked for me on Win98 and Win98SE machines. Using regedit find "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ODBC\ODBC.INI\ODBC Data sources" then Select Edit|New|New String Value. For Name enter "FoxPro Files" for data [double click on name] enter "Microsoft FoxPro Driver (*.dbf)".

This is all kind of ugly. I hope this has not caused the problems for you that it has caused for us.