At the risk sticking my foot in my mouth because I know nothing of this code, I wonder if this concern over the wasted space in the buffer is a sign of how old everyone is one the list ;-) I know it is hard for me to write inefficient programs because when I was in graduate school, 1mb of RAM cost one million dollars and that memory still drives me towards efficiency. However, these days, who cares about wasting 10k (or 100k) when everyone has two or more gb of RAM? Pick a ridiculously high number for the ratio and move on to working on what really matters... Neil