You're welcome; perhaps you would be so kind as to vote my answer (the one with the solution)? I must get a clever new signature for 2011.

Check out the overloads of String.Compare. You've got all kinds of options, including ignoring case, when comparing strings. A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^] Dave Kreskowiak Microsoft MVP Visual Developer - Visual Basic      2006, 2007, 2008 But no longer in 2009...

I don't know the best way to analyse this, but I have a possible solution. Instead of reading and writing to, say "\\SomeComputer\SomeSharing\..." try creating a Remoting application. The remoting application server will run in SomeComputer. Then, it always access everything as C:\ D:\ (or the apropriate local drive) and the clients access the remoting server application instead of the drive mapping. I did that when I started to have problems reading and saving files remotelly and all my problems where gone.