Thanks for your prompt response. I actually tried something similar while troubleshooting but without the last call to 'new'. Your example assumes though that the receiving process knows how to instantiate $class. That won't be the case for me. Am I right to think that the sole purpose of your call to 'new' is to run 'initialize'? Before posting to this forum I realized that calling (a hacked-up version of) 'initialize' before thawing seems to do the trick as well. Would it make sense to allow users to do something like this instead?: