Thanks for clarification. As far as giving memory back to the OS, I don't think it's unreasonable not to, but I also think it's reasonable to expect efficient reuse of memory from out of scope variables, maybe that's too much to expect ;) I did test your approach before I posted and it seemed to work but is a little messy in my situtation, I also know about the malloc bug and it doesn't seem to be an issue on my systems, but thanks for the informative response.

tigervamp