Hi Kevin,

>I am using a password file that stores usernames and passwords to log into the system.

Bad idea. *g*

Storing a password is inherently a security risk. It's much better to store a hash value instead of the password. A hash value has got the advantage that you can't get the original password back from the value even if you know how to derive the hash code. Also, with the more advanced has codes like MD5 is virtually impossible today to find a string that would result in the same hash code. If you don't want to use tools to calculate MD5 hashes or the CryptoAPI, you can use SYS(2007) as a simple (read insecure) hash algorithm. SYS(2007) takes a seed value as the second parameter giving you 65536 different variations. In VFP 8 you can also create 32-bit values. In this case, however, you cannot specify a seed value.

--
Christof