>As others have said, you will still use ODBC to get to your VFP data. However, if you do it through ADO, the ODBC manager will not be loaded. The manager is one of the slowest pieces of ODBC.

Using the OLE DB Provider for ODBC (MSDASQL) is surprisingly not as slow as one would think. Oh, sure, it's a perf hit, but not bad considering the layers one is going through.