how i test 1) every now and then i run the testall.sh script over the incuded doc files and a few selected trouble makers that ive received. 2) i have a set of supported features documents that display what mswordview should be able to do, i regularly check these to see if theres any feature rot. 3) occasionally i repeat the above test while using purify and identify out of bounds and mem leaks. 4) once a week i run the huge test of (1) over the 300 megs of uploaded documents that i have received on poor old skynet.csn.ul.ie, many of these are not word 8 docs as people often upload rtf & word 6/7 & excel docs as well, but its a good brute force test for crashes, but no good to see if the conversion makes sense. 5) i scan through the comments tha uploaders make of their files to identify trouble docs and visually scan the output, making changes if necessary. some tools i still use laola's lls to help me find errors, its a great piece of kit to have. i also gives me other ole code to compare against the one thats included in mswordview, if both of them cant decode a file, then theres pretty good evidence that somethings buggered in the ole tables, when word hangs on them as well, thats probably becomes definite. never having gotten the hang of hexdump i use the little jhex script that was posted in the linux-gazette at one stage as my hex reader. And theres nothing like doing a diff on the text output of a hexdump to find what changes between two versions of the same file, but with a different style chosen. purify is also the biz for tracking down mem leaks and uninitilized memory elements.