premise 1: Absolute Read/Write was commonly written by programmers (in old days of DOS). premise 2: Delphi's programmers is undoubtfully one of the largest community in the net. Amazingly I couldn't find such a topic of absolute read/writing in Delphi -not yet, at least. Though its quite easy (not very, indeed), there is no need to drop-down through DDK to accomplish the task. So there it is, building from the scratch, I try to explain how to do that in Delphi. (My English might be very bad, my natural language was ASM 80x86, though I do speak fluently in pascal & C :o)). ... Sept-19-1999 ========================================= about aa: email to: aa@bitsmart.com aa is not a programmer, if you do think so. Do not ask aa about programming, aa will tell you if he thinks you deserve it. aa does write some poets or theatre scripts, climbs a mountain and tries new recipes of cooking.