Hey, I want to use serialization for some kind of active replication, however the biggest barrier to this is the fact that serialization does not allow me to put the same object into the stream twice. To be more precise, I want to be able to serialize both to a network and to disk, and I very much like the elegance of the serialization approach (plus the fact it can re-create pointer references, arrays, and such). So my questions are: a) How difficult would it be to be able to allow an object to be serialized twice, where the second copy would more or less do an operator= (instead of creating a new object) on the first copy on deserialization. b) How difficult would it be to have more or less an 'appending' serialization stream - ie. I deserialize what I have previously stored on disk, and then continue to append to the serialization stream (which appends to the file from then on), making my serialization more or less unbounded. c) Is there currently an unbounded serialization stream? I mean, obviously the XML stream will not be 'complete' until you close the serialization stream and it can append any close tags it needs to, however if I wanted to continually write to a stream throughout the time my program is running, and if it crashes, be able to use that to get back to the state I was in, is it possible? I realize that in some respects this is kind of hammering a square peg into a round hole, since serialization seems to have been designed for 'one-short rights', but serialization and replication type functionality is very similar in nature. -- PreZ :) Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired. -- R. Geis