>So my curiousity at this stage is to learn what VFP developers are using it for ie what sort of applications are they building which are using XML and what benefits they see from using XML over more traditional techniques

we use XML in various ways in our application.

For example:

- data exchange between our application and other applications
- storing information with deep structures (means deeper than .INI format) in a kind of config file for our application
- passing an XML-like string as a parameter to a method/function/procedure instead of using a changing number of parameters
- passing query results back as a return value from methods
- passing back one return value when there is more than one value

HTH