to interested parties: i did some additional searching today and managed to find out that there is a bug in mingw's c++ include directory. to get shmem compiled for winxp using mingw, go into your equivalent to "/C/MinGW/include/c++/3.4.2/bits" open "char_traits.hpp" and comment out lines 309 and 311. The area, after commenting, should look like this: 309: //#if defined (_GLIBCXX_USE_WCHAR_T) 310: typedef wstreampos pos_type; 311: typedef mbstate_t state_type; 312: //#endif the define statement conflicts with a similar define statement that takes places at the begining of this template type's definition. after completing this simple patch, run the build script for mingw in the shmem 0.93 and try out the test programs, they should work at this point. the semi-notorious, "fixes error: no type named `pos_type' in `struct std::char_traits<wchar_t>'" error is gone. thanks to those parties that were looking into this issue and i hope this proves helpful for someone out there. chris taylor