Thanks again Steve ... i did something a little different but it helped all the same ... I was pretty beat up by this until your reply ...

Now ... this is slightly off topic with this current discussion but ....

I have this running right now by hand as a query that I run from Management Studio. I will be calling it from my vb ap that's doing all the other background file work.

Right now I have about 30 records per xml file and it takes 58 sec to read, parse, and load into my sql table. When this gets automated it will be receiving a new file about every 60sec. I really need to get this time down. Getting it to the 10 sec range would be where I am in need of if possible.

any thoughts???