>>I'd be VERY wary to work with anything keeping _HLock()ed strings around in general OOP code, as this at least makes you vulnerable to side effects differing on task, machine and settings - if those are so spread in memory as to disable creation of a new large bitmap, your program will work on - but without Rushmore support.

Main use for me would be comparing/grabbing ascii values out of moderate-length strings. You can do it using LIKE or Substr() but both clearly carry lots of checking and other baggage- not least because they have to work on fields as well as variables. _HLock and/or excessive passing of variables presumably can be avoided by shifting the whole string into your own memory space though you need to clean up afterwards in that case...