Thanks for this ... I plugged it in and now the script is exhibiting some other weird behavior. I won't go into it deeply here b/c it would require discussing the script as a whole which I don't really need to do as yet ... in short, the output from the script has changed drastically, and not in the right way ;). So I have some kind of logic problem in that whole area of code ... I am tracking it down. Thanks for kicking my thinking in a different direction! G