Kurt,
        thanks for your help and sorry the reply has taken so long. Turned 
out that the problem wasn't one of scope at all, but rather a subtle 
typemismatch. Timestruct.sec is of type array despite appearances, and I was 
trying to assign it an int value. Fixing this hasn't solved my problem 
however. I still don't get a live display of the time on the dialog.
                        regards Steve
---
---------------