yea. its obviously good to benchmark. thanks for the help guys. one more thing. since i OBVIOUSLY have alot of info in this file (which is an ini by the way...) i thought i saw somewhere about "flushing" an ini frequently becuase ini's are stored in memory. (i think its /flushini) is this true? and if so, would it help increase performance if i was writing to this ini at an avg 30-50 times a minute?