Wow, the original project had /D "WIN32" /D "_DEBUG" /D "CONSOLE" ... and other stuff while the converted project
on my XP machine had:

/D "WIN32" /D "_DEBUG" /D "CONSOLE" /D "_UNICODE" ... and other stuff hence my sudden problem with the build. Had I swiped away the UNICODE I would have been fine.

In response to Paul, yes a literal is a literal and a conversion of something is a conversion and requires a call to the runtime functions you mention. I was just trying to get this thing to compile - should have realized that _T/_TEXT are the most general and will compile to the correct thing depending on _UNICODE or not being present in the build flags.
I can use _L if I already know that I want to build unicode.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...=vs.80%29.aspx
The above should get me going and will also help me when I need to count chars and when I need to use the sprintf_s, fopen_s, and _wfopen_s types of functions.

I think I will just go back and change all my code to UNICODE - with the justification that I may want to internationalize my code right away. If I did NOT need to internationalize, then I guess I could leave a lot out of it by changing the compile flags to the non-unicode. But if I use the _T/_TEXT macros, I should be able to go either way (hopefully).

Thanks for the help - it shouldn't take me too long to pretty up all of my strings - whether MFC CString or old-style TCHAR/char.