Ilmar,

>I need to import xml documents containing heirarchical data, for which I have an xsd style sheet.
>If I try to load these into the xmladapter, I get a parsing error on the first line. The first line is simply ?xml version="1.0" ? (with the usual brackets, which this message won't allow me to add)..
>I assume the problem is that the document is not in one of the formats that xmladapter supports.

Your problem might just be that you forgot the second parameter on LoadXML method that must be .T. if you are loading from a file. It might be helpful to post your actual code. For example, this should create a parse error:

oXA=CREATEOBJECT("xmladapter")
oXA.LoadXML("myfile.xml")

It will work by changing the second line to:

oXA.LoadXML("myfile.xml", .T.)

That might not be your problem, so post your code if that's not it. Maybe we can at least get you over the first hurdle of loading the file. Then, we'll see about the hierarchical stuff. (Are you using VFP9?).