I've looked at Jack Reeves' XDRStream code from earlier CUJ articles. I've tested his code which seems extract values properly, but has problems with tellg, seekg, ... returning incorrect values and corrupting the stream state. This seems like an ideal application for the iostreams library. JR's implementation is based on an XDR_CHAR 32 bit character type. Any thoughts on whether this is the ideal approach? Any guidance on design directions would be appreciated. Thanks, Jeff