Well, so far I have been able to verify that the data is clean: no
bogus characters.

I loaded the file into Open Office'sspreadsheet. It properly detected
that the data file is a tab delimited, plain text file, and loaded and
displayed the data without incident.

The error I get with the temporary files having only varchar fields is
that 11/22/1999 is an invalid value for a date. I don't understand
this since the table has only varchar fields.

I CAN insert data, a record at a time using the query browser!

I'll work on the other questions you asked over the weekend.

Ted