KRowe wrote: I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to say. It's a common misconception that C++ knows about things such as input/output, files, Windows, etc. I was simply clarifying that without extra packages such as STL, WTL, ATL, or MFC, what you are after is not possible. KRowe wrote: (I know that my includes add some extra baggage but it is still far less than MFC and I'm trying to minimize them as well). Unless the code will be running on a cell phone or an older PDA, trying to optimize for size is not a worthy exercise. Thinking about "how big" the code is almost always leads to a lot of effort that produces no payback whatsoever. What matters is how big the data is. This goes back to the days when programmers were taught that "smaller is better." KRowe wrote: I would have to argue with you about weather MFC would have made it much easier to do what I am doing however. All my program does is read a file and output it to the screen with some additional formating that requires me to output a single character at a time. With what you've described so far, I'm seeing a dozen lines of code, maybe two. KRowe wrote: This make the CString class almost useless for this. I've never known CString to be useless for much of anything. Do you have an example? KRowe wrote: Additionally, I have no controls and only 2 very simple dialogs in the app How can you have a dialog without any controls? "Opinions are neither right nor wrong. I cannot change your opinion of me. I can, however, change what influences your opinion." - David Crow