Thanks, I'll have to look into some books. The rest of that I understand, but it still remains that when there's a namespace attribute, like: <foo:bar xmlns:foo='foo' /> I can't select it even though the namespace is in the manager. I really suspect that MS made some controversial choices in implementing System.Xml.XPath.XPathNavigator.Select when it comes to the default namespace and the xmlns namespace. So I may have to implement my own and I don't look forward to it.