Hi Eric, welcome to Wine! http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms221240.aspx says the only time those two functions disagree on valid bstr's is if there are embedded nul chars, in which case SysStringLength probably returns a larger value. Are you quite, quite sure that your bstrs are valid? (In general, the best way to answer questions like that is to add a test case to your patch, and make sure it passes on Windows as well as Wine before submitting to wine-patches.) - Dan