I found a reference in a book listing the different C# data types (should be the same for VB.NET)
The book states that the range for System.String is from 0 to approximately 2 billion characters. So it appears that 2,147,483,648 is the max number of characters. I don't think I would reccomend initializing a string with that many characters :)

Einar

>>What is the maximum length of a string variable in VB.NET?
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>Hmmm... not sure there is one. The largest string builder you can create would contain 2,147,483,648 characters. This is due to that being the max value of an Int32 which is what the constructor accepts for Capacity.
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>Not sure if this helps you.
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>BOb