>I want to pull several zip files into a dbf (1 per record)
>
>I tried to use filetostr and store it into a memo field but that didn't work.
>

It should, but there's always the APPEND MEMO memo field FROM filename command, and its inverse, COPY MEMO memo field TO filename to extract it.

You need to extract the memo content to a .ZIP file before unzipping it or altering it.