What do you mean by "components are commonly used uninitialized" ? Have you actually seen cases where the code reads these values before they are init'd? Certainly valgrind never trips over them. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/