>I want to use the _crypt.vcx to protect credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. in an application that we distribute. We have and installed base of about 350 sites and have a routine that "audits" the users files and brings them up to date for the current version, no matter what their prior version is. My question is: I need to check certain fields in a dbf file and see if the data has been encrypted or not. If it is already encrypted, then I don't need to run the procedure to encrypt it. Is there a simple test that will return true or false depending on if the data is encrypted or not?

I don't know your data but I would assume it is made of readable characters (as opposed to gibberish -low or high ASCII). So you could read a few characters and if you find many outside the readable range (say ASCII 32 to 122) then that's what you have.