Thank you Screamer, that confirms what I had been getting the nagging feeling about. I had been leery of the globally scoped vars, since I would not consider using them in other languages. While I was wondering about the question in general, after I though about it for a minute, I realized that performance is not really an issue for this project - it is just an AIM bot, it winds up needing to sleep at times to keep it from hitting the AIM flood control limits anyway. I just reworked it scoping all arrays proper to their functions, and I don't feel any performance difference, really.