Thank you for the great response! The detailed sample was very informative. It turns out that the "Trusted_Connection" clause was keeping me from connecting successfully since I had a user account and password I was trying to use at the same time. I took out that "Trusted_Connection" clause and my code worked like a charm. I didn't realize it was that easy. I will be able to avoid processing an externally generated UNICODE text file entirely! I can just put the data in a cursor and work with it that way.

Now I will need to look into how to handle possible connection errors. Everything works as planned if there are no errors and fortunately I haven't had any network or server problems. Any particular sneaky errors I need to look for?