>VFP behaves a bit differently when compiled into a DLL than when compiled into an EXE or in the IDE. Maybe there's one of these things going on. Do you really get an error and do you know exactly on which line?

That would make sense. The error is always on the STRCONV() line. As the XML object I am using is converting to Unicode, we have to convert it back to UTF at the Web Service level. So, we have 3 conversions presently. We have the double conversion at the Web app level when creating the XML and another one at the Web Service level to put it back to UTF-8.

>Does the same happen if you return a hardcoded UTF-8 string in the webservice instead of using the one from the XML object?

I'll have to retry that. I faced some problems when trying to avoid any conversion at the Web app level and only have the proper one at the Web Service level.