>I knowing nothing about ADO, but I am looking for ways to access the DBC from outside of VFP which do not involve ODBC. Can DBF's in a DBC be accessed and written to using ADO? Thanks.

Calvin,
Yes they can but you are still going to use the ODBC driver. When you use ADO, you must specify a provider for it to use to access the data. Some DBMS systems have OLE-DB providers and you can specify these in the connection string for ADO. Currently, VFP does not have a provider (this changes in VFP 7) so you have to use the OLE-DB provider for ODBC and now you have come full circle.

HTH.