I can lend some advise with the COM safe arrays if thats what you mean. ja - I was thinking you could read the file in either text-mode or binary-mode. Text mode is pretty straight-forward, binary mode you would need to do some homework. Might try returning a variant array of uchars or bytes or the like, not sure if Kixtart can handle it. If it did would probably just convert it to a variant array of longs anyways. Then when your write the binary data back, your stuff would probably need to convert each long back to byte. If Kixtart can handle a variant array of bytes then all is good.