I usually hate writing on these resurrected threads but a couple days ago I made a strings patch on my Digitech GNX3, and Im kinda excited about it.

yeah as killboy said, with certain effects, you can pretty closely emulate strings. more like a synth strings/ebow sound, though.
get on your bridge pup, roll back your tone knob a bit. use the noise gate and make it do automatic volume swells, and crank some reverb.that alone wouldnt sound like strings, so I put on a detune effect, cranking it to +24 (the highest going up- not down.) that worked a bit, but it still was missing something. so, a nice vibrato effect (sine wave, slow and pretty shallow) did the trick. add a bit of compression to smooth it out and sustain a bit, a very slight, creamy distortion... and some pitch shifting. (used a 5th and octave)

so you need a ton of effects, but it does sound sweet.