>Lee,
>
> Here's the first answer to your question. I'm forwarding it
>unedited.

Sorry Lee, I seem to have messed up forwarding the message. Here the text sent to me by one of our VB programmers:

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I would really have to sit down and work with the code to solve the problem, but here are some ideas that might help Mr Perkins:

1. Although not an expert on RTF, I have never seen an RTF document with any background other than white (i.e. have you ever seen a MS Word document with a colored background? I havent). So I am not sure the background can be changed at all. Like I said, I have limited experience with .RTF so this may be wrong.
2. The way the string is built could be solidified somewhat. First, never use the "+" sign to concatenate strings in VB. If nothing else, it ensures future code reuse because MS has said the "+" sign will not be supported as a concatenation operator in the future (probably because pointer arithmetic is coming in future versions of VB, and the "+" sign might do something like sum the memory offsets of two strings, rather than concatenate them). Also, you could try building the string (or at least the parts of the string that do not work) manually, i.e. using CHR() to insert the specific characters you want. I don't know how the .RTF control interprets backslashes, but it sounds as if one or more backslashes are getting misinterpreted in the parse. Step through the code, watch the string be built character-by-character and determine what's not being built correctly and why.

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HTH - Dallen