>>>>=STRTOFILE(oIE.Document.XMLDoc.xml, "c:\myfile.xml")

>I admit I haven't really looked at changes in the IE 5 DOM. I doubt however that the reference you get in the XML property is a DOM reference. It's just going to be text that can be loaded into the DOM.

The XML property is just text. But the "XMLDoc" object I referenced in the example above is a reference to a DOM object that gets created implicitly when a page with a data island is loaded. IOW, the data island is a XMLDOM object, and the XMLDOM object has an XML property, like all other XMLDOM objects. You don't have to load anything into a DOM that you create, it's done for you when the page is loaded.