>
> Thank you both for your help.
>
> Do you think this would work if I saved the contents of this field to
> disk for each record, recreated the blob as text type, and then loaded
> the blob field with the files from disk?
>
> Would this give me a different result than creating a new field and
> moving the data (update table set newfield = oldfield)?
>

clarify the content for us.
Is there UTF-16 characters in this content?
or is the xml header something you have copied from somewhere and it's just
for transport?
Can you send me one entire field content?
Alan