Oh, and:

Thanks on the c.value; I'll try that, but I'm curious as to why it worked initially....

it was probably because at one point "c" was a string (therefore when you did c.value you got an error) but then it changed into an indigo.Variable object. Another thing that would probably be more obvious if you were more comfortable with Python.

thanks. I did spend a lot of time working through the python docs over the weekend. The real problem with them is examples are very scarce and even though i have done a reasonable amount of programming (including Modula 3 upon which python is partially based) I found the docs very difficult to understand.

BTW, I had constructed my calls and script pretty much the way you suggested and only ended up with what you saw because it didn't work that way. I'll try this and work through and hopefully I'll learn python's eccentricities....