MichaelRed,
I have had a quick look at the Data field in a test 2000 format database of mine in Access 2002 SR1 - I created a form based on MSysAccessObjects with a multiline textbox bound to the Data field, and looking, it just looks like gibberish and makes no real sense to me at all, with nothing obvious being anything in particular.
I opened each of the system tables in the relationships window, and there are no (predefined) links between them, and opening each in design mode, there are no comments against each field either.
I agree that data type and size used to appear in the system tables in Access 97 but don't have a system running that version easily to hand now for a thorough investigation to see if I can work out what has changed to what.
My apologies for not checking this was still available with the latest version before posting.
For what it's worth, my access documenter mentioned in the thread that I referred Dan01 to uses DAO code to operate, as I thought that selecting data from system tables was not the 'official' way of obtaining information, although it proved a little quicker than a For Each Next loop on a collection.
I am aware that this particular library has been superseded by ADO, but have not found an equivalent method of looping through each of the items in a collection, or obtaining metadata about database objects.
John