  Charm production as related to the determination of the strange sea density
in deep inelastic charged current processes is studied predominantly in the
framework of the $\overline{{\rm{MS}}}$ fixed flavor factorization scheme.
Perturbative stability within this formalism is demonstrated. The compatibility
of recent next-to-leading order strange quark distributions with the available
dimuon and $F^{\nu N}_2$ data is investigated. It is shown that final
conclusions concerning these distributions afford further analyses of presently
available and/or forthcoming neutrino data.
