Ok, so I am going to go ahead with the straw grabbing. I was messing around with Drew's suggestion to ouput to text, combined with casting various substrings as various data types, and I ended up with this...and I don't even know it it will display here...

------------------------------

øM

øM

d<C

ßæC

… M

Indeed, they are not displaying as they do in the output. However, I took one of them at random, this guy, '', and converted to ASCII...

SELECT ASCII('')

-----------

8

(1 row(s) affected)

So, if ASCII 8 = backspace, does anyone think this has any meaning, or is SQL Server just totally confused by the nature of this data? In my results pane, the character actually looks like a vertically aligned rectangle with a slightly ovoid white dot in the center. Could this be the seemingly confounding EBCDIC? At this point, I think I'm going to stick with OPENQUERY, so any further discussion would be academic. That is, of course, unless anyone thinks my errand is anything other than a fool's. Thanks.