You are missing my point, if people had the tar utility on their Windows boxes then the issue over the Windows filesystems not supporting the extra features is a moot point. This is because the GNU tar util can update tar files in place, thus solving that particular problem.

The problem that my tool is going to address is the fact that most Windows users do not have a copy of tar on their machines. GNU tar is available from http://www.cygwin.com/, but only as part of their Unix tools suite, which means a 20Mb+ download, just to get one utlility that you they are unlikely to use for any other purpose.

I suspect that the average Receiver user is going to be less keen to "get their hands dirty" than the average empeg user, I don't think many of them are going to install http://www.cygwin.com/ just to try out new software for their Receiver. It is also clear that most Receiver users don't read this BBS (only 150 registered users), so I'm not quite sure how they are going to find out about the patch, but that's a different problem...

Believe me, it is far easier for me to write the tool in VB. I'm afraid VB is my natural enviroment, it would take someone far more on the ball with C to make the GNU tar source work on Windows.

Anyway, it turns out that the tar file format is more simple that you would imagine, so the tool is nearly finished.