Thanks for the suggestion about the MSXML parser, I think I can make good use of that somewhere else in my app. quite soon. The task I had in mind for curl is reliable FTP Get/Put.

I had originally planned to use Ncftp for FTP but I've since discovered that the API variant costs $500 and appears to be *nix only. I guess* I can still use the command line versions of either curl or Ncftp by invoking a cmd shell from WSH but I was looking for something more elegant

* (I am assuming that I can run the WSH script from task scheduler AND have it shell cmd windows without a user logged on interactively. I will try to test that shortly).