>This is something that I'm also interested in. thanks for the link to your article. i don't have time to read it right now, but (as long as this isn't answered in your article), i was hoping you might provide a comparison between the security provided by the encryption of data using cryptapi in foxpro to using a backend server such as mysql or sql server. not sure if you can provide a comparsion (or if this even makes sense - i am not very knowledgeable about this), but any help would be appreciated. I would think that using cryptapi would be an easier way to provide some data security than setting up a client/server. any thoughts?

Not the same obviously. CRYPTAPI will give you easy access to strong segurity for some fields (columns) in some records. To encrypt and decrypt all tables on the fly it would be a lot more work on your part. A commercial solution like Cryptor (http://www.hallogram.com) would be better.

The best solution if data security is really important, is to migrate the data to SQL Server, no doubt. DBF's are not secure by nature. SQL Server is what I would use.