Try a couple of things: 1 - use the following message: ::SendMessage( m_hwndText, //Handle to edit control. EM_SETBKGNDCOLOR, 0, clrBackground) ; //e.g., ULONG clrBackground = RGB(255, 0, 0) ; 2 - Also, I seem to remember some time ago having to first put some text into a rich edit before I could change the background. You first have to select the text using CHARRANGE, then use CHARFOMAT2 to format the text. I have a vague recollection of putting a single space character into the rich edit to get it to work, but you may not have to. Scott

MSXML comes with Internet Explorer (which is required to be installed with Windows in every OS since Win98). It has both a DOM and SAX parser. TinyXML implements as little of the DOM standard as possible to make a decent parser. You might call it DOM-lite, but it is still, technically, a DOM parser. The nice thing about it is that you can compile it into your application. Xerces is another opensource parser that supports the full DOM and SAX standards, but since you don't want to install a DLL, this probably isn't the route you want to go. Since your OS restriction is limited to the Windows family, your best bet is to use either TinyXML or MSXML. MSXML offers all the features you would ever need and then some, and is guaranteed to be installed on all the given OS's (just make sure you bind to an older version). If you decide to become a software engineer, you are signing up to have a 1/2" piece of silicon tell you exactly how stupid you really are for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week Zac

Well... I am using Visual Studio 6.0 And it would not be possible for me to move to Visual Studio .NET 2003 or higher. Anwar.