'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Integer vs Strings.

Yes, young padiwan, this is a common error made by many a programmer.

I come from the old school where you declared EVERY varaible type and convert numeric strings before doing ANYTHING to them.

Sloppy programming like what you encountered is why M$ is constantly having to publush patches. They tend to assume that the compiler will make everything good and right, when the truth is that it won't. The compiler cares nothing about what you want, only about how the code's written, and even then, what you THINK you wrote may not be what you really wrote. :P

Cheers