Thanks for persevering! I tried the APPEND FROM with the ON ERROR setup you suggest but I still get the errors!! It seems as though this particular error is not caught by the vfp error handler, it just bypasses straight to the screen.
I have managed to connect however through ADO/OLEDB without getting the errors. I've got the data into a Recordset but my problem now is how to run reports on it. Trying to transfer to a local cursor in order to do this seems extremely slow (approx 100 recs per 5 secs) and with over a million recs I don't really know where to go next.
I posted another question about this particular issue earlier.
Many thanks.