Richard,

>Well, it turns out that if an integer field in the XML has a value of zero (0) in the first record of the XML, then XMLTOCURSOR() converts the entire column of the cursor into a logical field with a value of .F....

One simple trick that avoids using a schema is to create a cursor with fields the way you want them and then use the 8192 flag to tell XMLTOCURSOR to append the incoming records to that cursor instead of creating a new one.

* set up the cursor the way you want it
CREATE CURSOR mycursor ( code c(10), id i, amount n(10,2) )
* 8192 flag = append to existing cursor named in second param
* NOTE: If you put a filename in first param, you also need 512 flag
* (8192+512)
XMLTOCURSOR(lcXML, "mycursor", 8192)