>Need a suggestion on opening and splitting out, then parsing a 3.5 gig text file. What software can I use to get into this file and manipulate, save its contents?

Try the low-level file functions, FOPEN(), FGETS() (or FREAD()), to open and read the text file. After reading a chunck of text an manipulating it, you can save it to DBFs. If you are going to surpass the 2 GB VFP table limit, you can use SQL Server.