An addendum to an earlier post in this thread. The Oracle drivers I have the most success with are Oracles 8.0.5 drivers. I have tried the MS versions with other MS products, most noticelbly Visual Studio. The MS drivers often returned an error for no apperent reason, or simply locked up. In VFP, I often got the error that started this thread, or a 'source table fields have changed' error. this was very frustraing, as no changes to structure had happened. Out of sheer frustration, I changed my connection over to Oracle's drivers, and my problems seemed to end. I belive it may have something to do with better handleing of Oracle's native data types, esp. the VARCHAR2 data typr. At least that seemed to be the fields that the MS drivers did not like.