>I actually was thinking that creating an external holder for what's in the tree might be helpful for some other parts of the program. The trouble is that it doesn't get rid of the problem. If the user expands all the nodes, I'm right back where I started.
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You could probably just create a wrapper class inside of VB (an ActiveX control) and have it communicate with the treeview instead. It wouldn't be necessary to wrap the entire control, just add a few methods to Add/Set the array for you. Then you use that array w/the DBI control.