Thank you both for your help.

Kevin, with all due respect and appreciation, your solution was a little "over the top" for me, plus it seemed from the SELECT portion that knowledge of all the column names in advance was required (which I was hoping to avoid).

phytax
A "short and sweet" solution like yours is what I was hoping for - however I ran into a problem because the ds.ReadXml method does not accept the XDocument object - but the good news is, after searching around, I found how to fix it -here is the final code (to get from the XML string to a dataset):
Code:
Dim responseXDoc As New XDocument
responseXDoc = XDocument.Parse(strData) ' strData is your Xml in a String
Dim objReader As XmlReader = responseXDoc.CreateReader
Dim ds As New DataSet 
ds.ReadXML(objReader)