It's fairly safe to say that all punctuation characters will cause an issue in key fields.

Except for I/C items, I just did a conversion with lots of special characters, the only ones that choked were the ones with leading spaces.

And " causes an error in IC items. The rest are OK.

So based on what I'm reading from two experienced with SEM the use of an asterisk (*) in the item key is OK.  Is that a fair assumption?

Yes * will be accepted. Go to IC Setup Options and check the list of separators on the Item tab.

A quick and dirty test is to enter characters in the item number field and see what it takes.

Thank you both for your responses.  As a quick follow up, did either of you (Ettienne and Jay) do a conversion to 300 ERP from a 200 ERP system that necessitated converting the data to PRO 2011?  If so, would you share how you accomplished this; including any problems with db structure differences.

Install Sage Pro 2011 - that's a duh question.