Again - being tentative here. My understanding is that "out" is only to be used when the first argument is a view or table. Anything T-SQL there will result in an error (with direction set to 'OUT').

given the proc you have below - the only valid value for the @direction parameter is 'queryout'. Which kind of begs the question - why is it a parameter at all?

Or - did I miss the question entirely again?

And Jeff - there's something missing to the "existing connection" explanation. I ran that from within QA, and it fails without the -S parameter. Maybe because I'm on a named instance on a machine with several instances (I'm ONLY on named instances - no default instance)?

I use bcp so little, I'm very rusty. Well - I actually use it a LOT - my jobs run it bunches of times a day - but I haven't had to tweak them in so long - I forget~!