Hi Evan,

Thanks so much for your reply. I will give your solution a try later this evening. One thing that immediately comes to mind after looking at your code is, how do I determine the registry key to use when I will not know which version of Outlook the end user will be running? I wonder if the only thing in the key that will be different would be the version number. If that is the case, maybe I could increment through a version number until the array is created???

Any ideas on this one?

Thanks again,

James


>>Does anyone know how to programmatically retrieve all of the categories from the Outlook Master Category List including those added by the user? I can retrieve categories for a specific contact or appointment if one or more categories have been selected. However, I'm needing to get to the Master Category List. Anybody done this before that would like to enlighten me?
>
>Whew, this took a while to figure out. The Master Category List, including categories added by the user is stored as binary in the registry. Using the Windows Scripting Host (WSH), you can read this value
>
>

>DIMENSION laTest[1]
>* read hex values into array
>WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
>laTest = WshShell.RegRead("HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Categories\MasterList")
>lcString = ''
>FOR i = 1 TO (ALEN(laTest) - 2) STEP 2 && skip every 2nd character since it is a space
>    * convert ascii code to character
>    lcString = lcString + CHR(laTest(i))
>ENDFOR
>? lcString
>