I've so far managed to avoid streams but now I am realy stuck.
I have a method (of a class I did not write) which returns either

System.Xml.XmlTextWriter OR
System.IO.Stream

I just want to put what is returned (some simple xml) into a string but after hours of trying and searching books and on line I am still unable to do this. I am sure this cannot be hard, Can anyone help please??

The 'Read' method of a stream object returns a byte array. You can then use the 'GetString' method of a suitable 'Encoding' class to convert that byte array into a string. The process is complicated a bit because the stream may have the bytes in it encoding in any number of character encoding formats, so you'll need to choose the one that's appropriate for your source.

Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com