man that was about the most conclusive explanation i have seen! i can't wait until lunch so i can try it out while i am not working. thanks to everyone (soja, tracer, and others) for helping me with this. i am still trying to work through the api calls. this has been a great learning experience and i appreciate the help. by the way i have been using tsearch and tmk (check my comment lines in the above code where i mention tsearch) for trainers i made in the past, but the tmk only let's you do certain things. i could make more graphical and customized trainers with blitz3d package. thanks again!
best,
mike
best,
mike