Thanks for the reply. Yes, it appears to be missing info, in this case type definitions. I'm pretty sure it's not seeing the local typemap file or at least, not parsing it correctly. This makes me suspicious that it's my installation of perl. The interesting thing is that the other 3 XS tutorial examples work just fine. I'll check out the URL you mentioned. I have not seen it, only the one I mentioned. BTW, do you know which perl version is currently considered the stablest/best. I've heard that 5.6 is too new to be stable and versions older than 5.00503 are too old.