Ion- There is some missing documentation for shmem. basic_named_shared_object is missing the member functions that are in basic_named_object_impl. I wouldn't have brought this up except that I've got a question about some of them. (Actually, Google's cache has some documentation on some of this. Is that out of date?) When you create a named_shared_object, your examples do so on the stack in the creating (or opening) process. From looking at the code, it appears that a named_shared_object::segment_manager is created in the shared memory. These segment_managers are also undocumented, but it appears that they do many (all?) of the things that can be done through the named_shared_object. I'm hoping to use one of these. I'm hoping to store an offset_ptr to the segment_manager in a shared object that I'm creating. The object would then be able to use the segment_manager to allocate and deallocate shared memory. Is that the correct use for these things? Am I going down the wrong track somewhere? -Fred