>I created a simple VFP7 COM object that takes a character string as a parameter and parses it into various parts. Works fine for short strings, but it crashes with "String too long to fit" when passed more than 255 characters.

Got code you can post or email to me? Works fine for me. I build the following into a COM server project called "utcom":

DEFINE CLASS foo as Session olepublic
PROCEDURE foo(foo as String) as string
	RETURN foo
ENDPROC
enddefine

Then execute the following:

ox=newo('utcom.foo')
?ox.foo(REPLICATE('x', 2500))

and it works fine, printing 2.5K "x"s to the screen.