Mark,

>When the program control is returned to the calling GetDataAccessObject method however, all of a sudden, the loDataAccess has become a NULL
>When I then removed the 'set step on' command, there was no problem anymore.
>This made me think that running the debugger at that point influenced
>memory space or something like that.
>It looks as if I 'm missing something fundamental here.

This sounds like a fluke...if a method returns an object reference the calling code should receive that reference. I'm not sure why you were experiencing this!

Regards,