Hello Bonny, sorry for the slow response I have not had access to the Web for a while, the way I call Ricks' DeserializeObject is as shown in his article

i.e

MyConfig cfg; // MyConfig is a subclass of wwAppConfiguration

cfg = wwUtils.DeserializeObject("Mycon.cfg",typeof(MyConfig),false)

I resolved the original error by casting cfg to my class type

cfg = (MyConfig) wwUtils.DeserializeObject("Mycon.cfg",typeof(MyConfig),false)

but it now fails on the line ( in the DeserializeObject method )

serializer = new XmlSerializer(ObjectType);

where ObjectType is the result of typeof(MyConfig), I don't have the time right now to perservere with it but thanks for your interest, if you want I can send you the complete code, thanks again