Hi Alan,
Thanks for your help with me on this.

I think I know what might be wrong here. It was you being definite
about the behaviour being strange that has made me realise my error.

I think in my import routine (from BDE to FB) the nulls from the old
became empty strings (not NULL) in FB.

But I still don't understand the results for the query:
SELECT COMMENTS
FROM STOCK
WHERE NOT COMMENTS = ''

Yields no records.

I know now that there are 20 records which have legitimate comments,
and the rest are blank strings, so I don't understand why the above
query retrieves no records.....

Thanks again for your help.

-Ryan

> there's got to be something in the fields...
> try updating one seting a field to NULL and try it again