No need for anyone to spend any more time on this -- Sorry if anyone spent time on this, I think there is code on this website in the articles that would help me. In the COM section, "STL Compliant Class for SafeArrays", the code returns safearrays from a COM object, which was my problem. There may be other articles as well. I will look at that to find out what I am doing wrong, so no need for anyone to look at this any further, thanks for the effort. David Spain, C++ Applications Programmer