[Greg McKaskle]

There is nothing wrong with your approach, so there must be something wrong with the implementation.

Review the code that writes the binary to ensure that it writes what you expect. Pay special attention to conditional code.

ftp the file three ways, once using binary mode, once using text mode, and once with automatic. Use file size or contents or diff to determine if the auto matched binary or text. My suspicion is that the file was corrupted during the transfer using text mode.

Review the code that parses the binary file, again paying close attention to any conditional code.

Greg McKaskle