A little bit more info: The subject should be "Marshal::dump thinks REXML document is a singleton?!" And I've confirmed that the same error occurs regardless of whether I'm using irb or not. I also took a quick tour through the REXML code, thinking that perhaps some member object of the document might be a singleton, but I didn't find anything even suggestive of singletonness anywhere: no private constructors, no inheritance from singleton classes (unless it's very well hidden). I wonder how Marshal determines that an object is a singleton? Apparently it's implemented in C, so browsing the source code probably wouldn't help me much. -- Matt Gushee Englewood, Colorado, USA mgushee / havenrock.com http://www.havenrock.com/