"Reusser, Edward" <Edward.Reusser@actel.com> wrote in message news:5E916BAE1732F344BAFD713DF2373479016EAAA9@SV-MSG-01.amer.actel.com... Robert, But the same exact problem occurs. Even using boost serialization, a text value within 2 tags cannot exceed about œ megabyte in length if it contains escaped character sequences, because when it is read back it will not be properly converted to XML. I know the entire XML string is being translated out to the file because I can open the file and see that it is correct. Furthermore, the serialization library doesn't report any errors in reading the key/value pairs. It isn't until I parse the value using the xml_iarchive that it fails. **** I suspect that both serialization and xerces are having the same problem. The problem is that standards for xml/html escape sequences are ambiguous. and not correctly escaped. This occurs when the string includes non-string charactes like null, and who knows what else. Its probably not a hard fix - but would take alot of time to sort the all the varying standardese. If anyone want's todo this let me know. If your doing 1/2 mb of string - its possible it contains some wierd characters that neither xerces nor I know what to do with. So a couple of things to try would be: a) try xml_wachive - this stores data in UTF-8 and might be more robust. b) try stroign the string as a "binary object". This would consume more spaces as it stores the data in binary coded text - but should be bullit proof. c) If you really, really need this, and you want to do your bit for humanity, you can checkout the xml escape/unescape that the serialization library uses. This is a little out of whack as it uses one method - dataflow iterators to escape, and another - spirit parser to unescape. Maybe that should be changed or at lease looked at. When in doubt - I prefer symmetry as should be apparent from the naming conventions used by the serialization library. As for the 2nd crash, using text_iarchive and text_oarchive within Library B, this still gives the internal structure overflow error. When I get time to go back and look at it again, I will probably rewrite it so that all of the shared_ptr's are stored directly and make other simplifications. If you have a mechanism for me to send this DLL directly to you, then I will attempt to get permission to do so. *** Errrr - thanks but no thanks. I woud prefer to run this via through you. Robert Ramey