HELP! XML,VB,SQL 2000, ADO PROBLEM

Hi,

This is my very first post and I would be extremely grateful if someone could help.

I have a recordset within VB6, which retrieved xml data as FOR XML AUTO from a SP in SQL 2000. Once retrieved I saved the XML data into an ADO Stream as adPersistXML and then read the data into a string. This all works great, but my problem is all the data contained within the string is in a HEX format (see below.)

I would be so so happy if someone could point me in the right direction, as to fixthis and return my data in a more readable format.