Dear code4libbers, I love you. Thank you for that Stack Overflow post. I love reading those. It seems the ones I end up reading are usually of the, "Hey, you moron, why are you trying to do that in the first place? Don't you know you can write [whatever] in [whatever language only two people know, one of whom is dead, and the other one lives in a fortress in a remote location and only answers questions in dactylic hexameter mirror-written on parchment with iron gall ink] and that will make your problem disappear? Duh!" All of this effort, by the way, is to massage these records so that I can feed them into an importer for another system...and the importer is not doing what the specs say it should do. My records are a thing of beauty now, and they are destined for the dustbin. But at least I have learned new XML skills! Julie Learner of Things the Hard Way