Jim,

>I just couldn't resist: Given that you know when you are finished with an object, then if RELEASE actuall released the object, you woudn't have had the devil of a time you describe.
>You were put through hoops entirely unnecessarily!

No, I WASN'T. The issue was purely one of each node having 4 separate double linked lists and a snigle linked list running through it. That's 9 object pointers. The graph in memory also ran into recurrsion limit problems while nodes caused the release of other nodes. The single linked list of allocation was the solution.