Again, thanks for a quick reply - I was assuming it was TOracleSession property, perhaps hidden.
But is only solves my problem partly.
My current applications seem to work and display characters correctly - although have not performed extensive testing.
However, if I add a component or a string field to a query, and fetch the fields in the designer, I get TWideString and the 'reverse' error.
Is it possible to have this as a property on TOraceSession, which would then also work for the designer in my database forms?