Hey,

I'm having the exact same problem and just posted a detailed description at MSDN forums yesterday [/url] Unfortunately, I haven't gotten any answers there yet.

I found a posting this morning that suggested the problem is that the extra characters are because the BCP QUERYOUT utility is adding the file length at the beginning of the VARBINARY field contents before reading it in the external file. The solution is supposed to be creating format files, though I don't know if you need a different file for each file type (PDF, XLS, DOC, etc.) Here's the posting

I'll post something back if I can get this to work.

Good luck,

Bill