No messages were ever displayed from any of the 'die' parts, meaning the file was successfully opened each time. I verified the file was successfully writen to by opening it with Notepad and see the data there. I had inserted descriptive output before and after the sysopen statements and it showed the file being open and written to everytime. For some reason the file could be opened for reading/writing but when opened for reading it could't see/read the data.