Steve,
It's a VFP system capacity. Any char string or mem. variable cannot exceed 16 Mb. Actually if you need it to load somewhere and how depends on what you'd do with that file.
Probably you'd end up with lowlevel functions.
Cetin

>I'll try that workaround. Interesting idea.
>
>Maybe this is a VFP bug, since I am not really out of memory. In the past, I have seen the NT OS give this error when a system DLL ran out of file handles or something like that and a service pack was needed.
>
>
>>Steve,
>>You might do this :
>>create cursor myTemp (myFile m)
>>append memo myFile from 'e:\bigfile.txt'
>>
>>Cetin