yeah my intention is to dump it all into a text box, so is there any control which does supports the chr(0)? thanx for the info paul.

Nope I am not trying to make a hex editor, I am trying to transmit a file through winsock but something goes wrong in the transmit of the data, the file is only small (12kb) than I am trying to send, I wrote the code myself to open the file and save it, but I thought I was doing something wrong with that part of the code because when the file is saved after it is finished being recieved it is corrupt, Kedamans code for reading the file was the same as mine except mine was a function and I was filling in the string with the chr(0) instead of the space character, so I thought maybe that was what I was doing wrong so I changed it to the space, but the file still ended up corrupt, for saving I was just saving the file by just opening a file for output and printed the data that was recieved (it worked printing it for output, I tested it by just opening a file then printing it to a different location and the file worked). Anyway I was trying to open the corrupt file and the orignal and print them each to a different text file, and then find the first difference between the two so I could see where abouts it was stuffing up and if it stuffed up again after that.

Please don't tell me to check the example on vb-world I am trying to write my own from scratch.