>>Short Version of that gobbledegook: 'Hmm. Those are causing a weird, nasty side-effect, and maybe I will just get rid of them' :)
>>
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>In that case, you could just use NVL() in your Select statement to convert the nulls right off.

True, I found that in my researches. I was actually planning to backtrack into the table definitions in SQL 7 to get rid of them at the source, since I do have the luxury of doing that at this stage of the game, and we are not dealing with live production data yet.