>Ed, another thought, instead of placing the numbers in adatafile and then trying to encrypt it, is it possible to encrypt the numbers that go into the table and reversed when I run some validation code? IOW, can the table itself be encrypted?

Yep - look at Cryptor for an example of a commercial product that implements exactly that type of functionality. A great deal will depend on exactly how much security you need and the durability of that security; remember that the premise of encryption is not to make the content impenetrable, but to make the content impenetrable for a period of time sufficient to make the value of the data negligible at the time it becomes known or can only be known given the expenditure of resources whose value exceeds the value of the data by a significant amount.

I spent a fair amount of my misspent youth working in cryptology.