Alan only way I can see to do it is to to store my objects, or a reference thereto, into an XML attribute, which limits me to some ascii/charset representation. I realise I could pickle() the whole object, and put that into the attribute. But that would be highly memory inefficient, unless I delete the original object that was pickled, which would be time inefficient. I'm beginning to think I have to maintain my own namespace/dictionary for these things, indexed by id(object). Which is an acceptable solution. Is there a specific reason why id()'s can't be turned back into objects? Is it an implementation specific thing? Or is it to stop people messing with pointers, etc? Regards, alan kennedy ----------------------------------------------------- check http headers here: email alan: