Hi Kurt,

Tried the Foxpro Advisor StringBuilder tip, that costs about 34 seconds, a lot better than 440. But I still wanted more. It ended up in using the VFP low level file functions, which costs abaut 2,5 seconds.

lnSec = Seconds()
lcFile = "c:\test.xml"
Fclose(Fcreate(lcFile))
liFile = Fopen(lcFile, 2) && buffered is faster
Do While !.Eof
	Fwrite(liFile, .Fields(0).Value)
	.MoveNext()
EndDo
Fclose(liFile)
lcXml = FileToStr(lcFile)
Erase &lcFile
?'String:  ', Seconds() - lnSec

(The disadvantage is that you have to write a file to a disk.)
>This month's issue of Foxpro Advisor also has an article on speeding up strings with XML by writing large amounts of data out to a file instead of writing to a memory variable, however through my testing, the above method is still much faster.