We use 1099 software whose back end is dBase. Access/Jet aren't going anywhere.

Also, another poster complained about the ease of breaking into the database. That's a feature, not a bug....

Since constants worked, I gave up the other approach and used a Select statement to generate a bunch of update statements:

select 'update vend set fedid=encryptbykey(Key_GUID(''NewKey''), '''+ rtrim(fedid) + ''') where...