Hello everybody, if you're using or evaluating my portable binary archives be sure to get version 2.0 from the boost vault (http://www.boost-consulting.com/vault/)! (Remeber it only works with boost 1.33 and 1.34.) Version 1.x contained a serious bug that effectively transformed most of negative integral values into positive values! For example the two numbers -12 and 234 were stored in the same 8-bit pattern and later always restored to 234. This was fixed in this version in a way that does not change the interpretation of existing archives that happend to work because there were no negative numbers - as is unfortunately the case in our application or the bug would have surfaced long ago. Archives created by version 2.0 and containing negative numbers will raise an integer type size exception when reading it with version 1.x. Thanks to Markus Frohnmaier for testing the archives and finding the bug. PS @ Robert Ramey: Your portable binary example also suffers from this bug. In fact I felt free to copy it from you ;-) Ah, I see now that you fixed it in version 1.35. Didn't think you'd bother to since you wanted to remove it completely... Regards, -- Christian Pfligersdorffer Software Engineering http://www.eos.info