Hi, the serialization library is almost what im after. My only problem is that in the archive output additional data is added to the start of the archive (for example "22 serialization::archive" for text files). Is there any way of disabling this? In my case, I require a pure binary archive. Ideally i would like to write one if one doesnt exist but i'm not sure if i have time, depending on how hard it would be. How hard would it be do make my own archive type, where by i could set the endian field to convert bigendian to littleendian depending on what the user defines the 'archive endianess' to be on archive construction? I have done this with my own serialization library, however i dont want to extend that because it only handles c++ primitives and dealing with pointers things start getting horrible very very quickly! Thanks in advance. Chris _________________________________________________________________ MSN Messenger 7.5 is now out. Download it for FREE here. http://messenger.msn.co.uk