Thanks, folk, that's been very helpful... at least some progress is being made. Still in the woods, though... using the two comments above, i've able to get a list of the <id> tags in my xml (it outputs a list of all of them, starting with the "24" you see in the xml i posted, and going all the way up to the "45" in the full xml file). But if I add more firstChild's into the string, i only get a list of "null"s or "undefined"s, not the other tags' contents, like "timestamp", etc.

And even assuming I'm able to get to the point of being able to identify all the nodes through ActionScript, that still doesn't tell me how to do what I really need, which is how to hide some of them in the output (and i did read through the Flash help on all the subjects listed above.) I thought I'd be able to use removeNode for that, since I can now identify the <id> tag at least, but that doesn't seem to be working.. no errors, but the text still displays...

Anyone have any ideas?

thx.