Thank you for replying...

The conversion of the dates into the appropriate format does work, as I am using VBScript to rearrange the dates and they are accepted into the second...

Thanks, Anton...I'll take a crack at it!

Mike, Anton, Thanks for looking into this...

Anton: 1) I'm limited in what I can do with the output as the MF people are quite ornery about programming changes (well, what...

Mike, the fields are delimited (by a ~, long story), there are some numerics mixed with text but I am first importing everything as text (nvarchar, actually, except for three...

Mike, thanks for the input...

The data is, indeed, ASCII...actually, all of it imports fine as nvarchar.  As for the bad and null data, that doesn't seem to be an issue...