(incidentally, I hope I'm reading my situation right as almost necessitating multiplicity. my problem is that I want to construct a tree and be able to use the collection devices of xpath on it, eg child::, count(), etc.. my understanding is that this feature is not in xsl 1.0 but it will be in 2.0 - is this right?)

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but if you're talking about XPath support without XSLT -- yes, that's available too. If you're talking about performing XPath queries over the results of your transform within XSLT, the answer is also yes -- it's even available within XSLT 1.0 if you use a node-set() extension function. In XSLT 2.0 it'll be transparent.

what I'd like to do is create a hierarchy of nodes.
I just looked up the node-set() extension function for msxml3...
so if I have a variable:
<xsl:variable name="tree">
 <form name="form1">
   <control name="control1"/>
 </form>
 <form name="form2>
   <control name="control1"/>
   <control name="control2"/>
 </form>
</xsl:variable>