>> I have tried many combinations of things to speed this
>> up as you all have suggested. I have had no success
>> using "copy" at all because of problems with quotes
>> and other punctuation in the data.
>
>I must tell you, this doesn't sound reasonable to me. It's usually very
>easy, if you already have a program that writes down the fields, to make
>sure it scans the contents thereof and adds a backslash before each tab,
>newline and backslash in every one of the fields.
Is there a doc somewhere about what characters are treated
in some special way when doing a copy?