Thanks for the pointers! I will try these both tonight.
Attempting to do this in CLR or .NET shouldn't be too difficult.
This is my first attempt to encode / decode to embedded objects in anything prior to SQL 2005. I guess I've gotten spoiled by varbinary(max) data type and BulkColumn FROM OPENROWSET, etc.
I'll let you know in the next day or so whether I have any success.
Thanks,
Andre Ranieri