Thanks Marco. You are absolutely right. It's a long story but to sum up, after I'd rebuilt the Employees table with the LONG RAW column none of the picture fields were populated, hence I was getting errors originating from the JPEG unit when I tried the 'Assign' command. I mistakenly thought the errors were due to a difference between BLOBs and LONG RAWs.
Thanks for your prompt reply.
Neil W. Garside