Sorry to waste your time. It's a frickin' RS/IIS permissions problem (and my 
xml parsing and error checking was not so great). But I would be interested 
in how I could catch this error in the future (after 4 hours focusing on 
XML - now probably another 4+ dealing with permissions

When I got a response back from the RS web services it was an html page (You 
are not authorized to view this page. HTTP Error 401.2 - Unauthorized: 
Access is denied due to server configuration. Internet Information Services 
(IIS)), I was always looking for specific XSLPatterns (e.g. //ErrorCode) in 
code like nodeObject = xmldoc.documentElement.selectSingleNode(xslPattern) 
and expecting to get "nothing" back if the pattern was not found. See code 
again below.

When I put in the code you suggested I get back an error "-2146697209:No 
data is available for the requested resource." I would only get this back 
when I returned "nothing" to trigger error reporting, but when I used the 
"selectSingleNode" method I would get the previous "Object required: 
'xmldoc.documentElement'" VBScript error. So, it appears that 
selectSingleNode throws a vbscript error rather than returning nothing???

Any thoughts? And thanks again.

    Function getNodeObject(theResponse, xslPattern)
        'if using 6.0 HAVE to use XPath instead of XSLPatterns
        'and would HAVE to include namespaces and prefixes in the xpath
        'for nodes associated with namespaces
        Dim xmldoc
        set xmldoc = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument.3.0")
xmldoc.async = False
        xmldoc.load(theResponse)
errorMsg = xmldoc.parseError.errorCode & ":" & xmldoc.parseError.reason
        'set getNodeObject = nothing
        set getNodeObject = 
xmldoc.documentElement.selectSingleNode(xslPattern)
        set xmldoc = nothing
    End Function

    Function getNodeText(theResponse, xslPattern)
        Dim node
        set node = getNodeObject(theResponse, xslPattern)
        if NOT (node is nothing) then
            getNodeText = node.text
            set node = nothing
        else
            getNodeText = errorMsg
        end if
    End Function



"Martin Honnen" <mahotrash@y...> wrote in message 
news:ej8TWQejJHA.504@T......
> Don Miller wrote:
>
>> Function getNodeObject(theResponse, xslPattern)
>>         'if using 6.0 HAVE to use XPath instead of XSLPatterns
>>         'and would HAVE to include namespaces and prefixes in the xpath
>>         'for nodes associated with namespaces
>>         Dim xmldoc
>>         set xmldoc = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument.3.0")
>
> Add an
>           xmldoc.async = False
> here
>>         xmldoc.load(theResponse)
> then check
>           xmldoc.parseError.errorCode
>           xmldoc.parseError.reason
> here
>
>
>
>
> -- 
>
> Martin Honnen --- MVP XML
> http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/