It's such a wonderful sensation of enlightenment and finalization when someone (in this case vr) comes along and points out such a (seemingly) simple thing

... especially when I'd started that TCHAR** debug in July, and only visited it intermittently, since I was never making headway on it. Most of the time, when I think I have a SoPW, making the SSCCE rubber duck-s it without the post ever going through. But since even my SSCCE that I pruned and tweaked over the weekend didn't solve it, I finally had to post today.

(The other thing missing from my original was the pack string of Q vs L -- that conditional wasn't there in my original, so even if I had the ->{ptr}, $nFiles, the original wouldn't have worked because half the pointer was truncated.)

Thanks again, vr, for the extra set of eyes.