Bill, Forgive me, I didn't answer all of your questions re SOAP. Your basic soap message is going to look something like: Your data here So you'd build this up by concatenating the fixed elements and your data. Then it's a matter of where to send it & how. Wrapped around the above would be the HTTP header/trailer. Yes, your data could be binary AFAIK, but you might need to do a base-64 encoding of it first - I'm not sure. No handshaking takes place, but the server will send acknowledgments / error code back as a returned SOAP message. If you don't care about these you could ignore them - you don't need to acknowledge them. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu