If you come across issues with text fields not loading in a recordset using ASP Classic and SQL Server - it seems like the nvarchar (which is for Unicode characters) can be a problem.

I switched all of what used to be my longtext / memo fields to varchar(2000) and they then were able to load. Even varchar(Max) had issues.

I found on one forum that if you change your SQL server connection string to the SQL Native Client provider, i.e. DRIVER={SQL Server}; becomes Provider=SQLNCLI that it might work for varchar(Max)