Don,
I think you have to use CLOBs for another reason, too. SQLPlus still can't handle string literals longer than 2499 characters, and I think the Oracle ODBC driver has this problem as well. This means that if you have to create a script that does literal inserts/updates of some text and your text is longer than 2499 characters then SQLPlus won't do the insert. Also, if you edit a field in Access (ugh, I know, but it's sort of the best client on Windows to browse the database contents) and it had content of more than 2499 characters it gets truncated.
The disadvantage to clobs is that you can't say
select x from y where x like '%somevalue%';
(If I'm wrong about that I'd love to hear about it).
