Cheers David,

Well I have to come clean...

...it turns out the two chars at the end of each field are in fact a carrage return / line feed not spaces....

Hey... have just copied the value from my previous posting and tried to trim it... and it works... I think it will be hard to replicate the issue without having...

The field datatype is nVarchar....

Here is a copy and paste of one of the values in the table... 'Daytona  '

guarddata you're correct, that would be the simplest way to do it. Even if you want to create the empty database on another server... create the empty one locally and...