Though I still don't know exactly why this problem only occurs when the field contains more than 255 characters, I've been able to work around this problem. Seems that one of the options for remote views under VFP 3.0 deals with updating. Specifically, one a multi-user/shared connection setup, you can instruct FoxPro to automatically check whether any SQL updates to a table were made before committing the data, by checking for changes to any of the ff: key fields, updateable fields, modified fields or
timestamp.

This is accomplished by appending a SQL WHERE clause to the remote view's SQL statement. It so happens that ODBC chokes if
one of the fields being checked against is a SQL text datatype containing more that 255 characters (as in, our 'description' field).

So as a workaround, I simply set the remote view update checking to 'key fields only'. This prevents FoxPro from including our 'description' fields in building the SQL WHERE clause. However,
this has the added side-effect of making our data-entry less secure somewhat (only latest updates get reflected). Oh well, I guess this is just choosing between the lesser evil.

I am still curious to know whether anybody else out there has had the same or similar problem(s).

Peace,