struct Y { void* foo; }; class X { Y obj; public: Y& GetX(); }; X x; x.GetX().foo = NULL; -- I got nasty habits. I take tea at three.    -- Mick Jagger I blog too now[^]

Hi folks, Solved my problem, I'm so deep in the forest that I can not see clearly... anywho.... I had changed the function signature but did not bother to recompile the control project. Since the control project is in the same workspace as the form project calling it, I was making the wrong assumption that everything was getting compiled but the control project was not getting compiled therefore the diffrerence in method signatures.... duhhhhh.....:doh: :-O sun.lcr

Hi HTH, Thanks for comment. I'm not doing any erroring at all. Instead when i do something like this: dim o as new my atlObject textBox1 = o.foo 'returns a string textBox1 = o.foo 'fails in here ..... and I get the error message.... :confused: sun.lcr