Sheesh, it was a simple fix after all. I loaded VFP 9 beta on my trash machine, the one I throw all my test stuff on. Turns out I never upgraded that machine's Oracle install to 9i and none of my Oracle connections were working on it. I upgraded it to the 9i client and voila, it all works. Data Explorer is great! I wrote an application in VFP 6 a couple of years ago that allowed me to quickly connect to any ODBC source and browse the tables, but Data Explorer's interface is much easier (I'm definitely NOT the one you want to write user interfaces). Data Explorer ROCKS.

Bill