I Maked a new install on machine this night, and the same results, on console localhost Windows 2000 Server Version 5.00.2195 PG Version 8.1 Franklin >Franlin: are you making pg_dump from local or remote box and is this a >clean install? Try fresh patched win2k install and see what happens. He claimed this was local, not network. It is certainly an intriguing possibility that W2K and WinXP handle bytea differently. I'm not competent to comment on that however.