Thanks very much for the advice! I'm no longer an 'opening files for reading' virgin. I rechecked the file path, and gotten it wrong. Doh. It's solved now, thankfully. Next problem is to extract an image html tag from the file that i'm reading and print it out (sent that question today). After that, I'll need to write to the html file. Starting to find the hacking a lot of fun... Cheers, Richard