"Gibberish" in MS Access Tables

[MarsGuy]

Hi ALL,

I am redesigning a db and trying to preserve the existing
data to avoid re-inputting all the records. The old db is
a mess and some fields, apparently at random, will
contain what appear to be oriental or cyrillic
characters. Has anyone experience with this issue?

Thanks for your help.

 

[Allen Browne]

This is a form of corruption, experienced most commonly with memo fields.

See "Symptom: Memo field contains strange characters" in:
Recovering from Corruption
at:
http://allenbrowne.com/ser-47.html