>However I never found VFP's string handling fast. It uses things like
>handles to memory locations. If you do like in your code :

lcXML = lcXML + someaddition

>Adding over and over to same variable is not optimized at all. However
>that code might be optimized in different ways (in VFP there are at least
>3 ways:).

Actually, there is some optimization going on in that case. Unfortunately, it can cause the code to break in recursive cases. To avoid the optimization _IF_ you are hitting this problem, change it to read:

lcXML = "" + lcXML + someaddition