I'm sorry, I left out my *rant* on .net datasets persisted to xml.
So, what is wrong with the original ADO save recordset as xml?  At
first glance, sure the xml was difficult to read, but truly is a great
xml document to work with!  Didn't anyone ever mention in the
microsoft camp there that xml elements named as field names is a bad
idea?  That it is a much more useful source if the xml elements are
all named the same?  Do I *rant* alone?

Karl..