Perfect. I really appreciate your quick response.
Either I failed or the documentation hypertext failed. I didn't find the nicely related example in the documentation for Interpreter.
-- Mark
If you look online, you'll find many different solutions to this. http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/1737/how-do-you-convert-a-string-containing-a-number-in-c-scientific-notation-to-a-ma
In version 10, I would suggest using:
Interpreter["Number"]["8.9012234042552939E-3"]
SemanticImport might be able to do this all for you instead of Import. It works okay for simple files, but might need some guidance on the kind of output you're expecting it.