Thanks Matt !!

I've tried this and, to my surprise, it seems to work. Very happy and a big thanks!!

I can't mark it as a defintiive solution as I still don't know what was causing the problem. I may have misunderstood one of your entries, English being my 2nd language it's easy to make mistakes.

I'm still baffled at how SQL Server reads XML; I think my code (even if not mine..) uses XPath to 'get' to a node, and my suprise is that even when changes are added (like the new 'AffiliationInfo' level in the files) it manages to read the content and import it.

It is true, that some content is eliminated. My char fields have ~2,000 characters, so some authors or comments, the very long ones, might be capped. Still that's a minor problem for us, compared to the procedure crashing. And it's kind of ienvitable (unless you use Memo, Varchar max, etc), because you have to set a size for 'some' of your fields. But I get your point now.

Thanks again, p.