reading excel sheet- data being cut off near 256 characters

Hi,

  I'm trying to read an excel spreadsheet and I'm having this problem where a cell that has more characters gets cut off at a certain point.  When I copy and paste this from the excel sheet into notepad and look at the file size it says 259 bytes. There are 5 carriage returns that may not being read, so that would make 254 bytes.  No coincidence that it's around this length I assumed.

  Well, I looked into it by googling and I found the following link:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/08aa5d44-a7bb-4d60-8fa1-18370f154956/read-excel-cell-datarow-string-256-character?forum=adodotnetdataproviders

 Which suggested to change TypeGuessRows in the registry, but lo and behold, there is no Jet "folder" (okay I don't know enough about registry to know what the correct term is if they're not folders) under Microsoft in the registry.  Any suggestions? Anyone? Anyone?