Aren't you proud of me, Bill? I was messing around, writing a DOS program in C, to read ID3 tags in mp3 files, and everything was going well. My little program could read the TAG element, artist, title, but when I tried to read the album entry, not only would my program crash, but it locked up Windows totally, requiring a hard reset! Impressive. After screwing around with the source code [and rebooting Windows once or ten times], it finally dawned on me that it might be a memory problem. Doh! Sure enough, I do the malloc(), free() thing and everything works fine. I guess the whole memory allocation thing is kinda important.