Thx - had not realized that. Pretty certain that the API version will not be less performant than the other 2. OTOH secondary reasons like needed version testing speak for "my" mentioned solutions of vfp-sys() function or special dll as nothing needs to be tested on all different OS targeted. Ease of distribution speaks for using vfp-sys as no foreign dll needs to taken care of. OTOH having access to the implementation of the algorithm as is the case in the MD5 on Leafe might tip the scale for some - at least for me not needing to depend/believe in case of trouble is a definite plus even if I will procrastinate quite a bit before really loading a debugger with the debug version of said dll ;-)

>There's also the api implementation of md5. For larger strings (and files) this outperforms the vfp implementation
>

>>There is a MD5 implementation on Ed Leafe's site which has better performance - not sure which function has theoretically more overlap.
>>Or you can combine both functions as in Sys(asAbove, F5) + MD5(F5) as F5MemoGrp - need perhaps to cast the results into Char-Types.