Have you checked if the Collation is different on the 2 machines? It sounds like something with the character set. I am trying to see where a setting would affect that, but have not seen it yet. It may be something that was loaded with the SSMS piece on install and the one used on the database is not included on your remote machine. Is the DB Version and SP significantly different? I am just trying to think of what could cause this. I use local and reomte SSMS and have not run into it before (at least not yet :-)).