>Thanks for the response Dragan.
>
>So you think that 'filetostr()' will abide by the rules I mentioned?

Can't say anything stronger by "likely" - but then it opens and closes immediately, so even if its opening may break some of these rules, it's as short as possible. Actually, I'm not even sure this counts as opening the file; it's probably just a call to some system API which reads the file into some buffer without even bothering to keep a handle or anything.