Dan, I jumped the gun and didn't read your entire post. I ended up skipping a lot of parts, especially where you say that you are creating a document (for some reason I thought you were reading it). I looked at the setAttribute function and thought: ah he's writing it out. Sorry about all that. I'd still ask you to look into SAX though :) Especially when dealing with really large XML documents, whether it be reading or writing them.
- Jonathan Curran -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list