thank you very much songouki. your help is much appreciated. i apologize for the sloppy coding, but this is something i just put together for an experiment. so i didn't really pay attention to all that much detail. anyway, i agree with zaf kahn. it was done correctly because, as he said, listitem(1) becomes listitem(0) after executing the first piece of code. anyway, thanks a lot for the help. it's just what i needed. if there's any problems with the code you suggested i'll post another message. thanks again.