How about crunching this down to a short 10 line sample that reproduces the problem, that doesn't depend on a whole pile of context that we can't see and doesn't require external file access? <grummpymode>There's about a 99% chance that you will find the problem yourself in the process, but that's the price you pay for focusing on the issue rather than getting us to trawl through the code for you.</grummpymode>