Weird text compression problem

[jda]

Ruslan,

My database has a compressed text field that can contain quite a bit 
of data. One of my users sent me a rather large database (10 MB) with 
a few thousand records that make heavy use of this field. He found 
that, suddenly, this field just displayed garbage characters. I 
looked at it, and it's true -- it looks like it's the compressed data 
being displayed (i.e., not being converted back to MacRoman). What 
would cause this (and is there anything I can do to recover the data 
at this point)?

Jon