A ‘GUID’ also refered to as a Globally Unique Identifier is a double word value representing an object. There are many different examples of type of objects repesented by GUID's, amoung these include, shell extensions, toolbars, interfaces, type librarys, visual basic controls and shell references (e.g. Desktop, Recycle Bin e.t.c). GUID's are usualy represented as a string sperated into five sections by hyphens. The first section contains 8 hexidecimal digits, the second, third and fourth 4 finished off with a final 12 digit number. String GUID's can be though of as a middle layer of information bridging the divide between human readable information and computer code. GUID's as are so named because the routine used to generate them guarentees uniqueness accross all GUIDs generated using the Microsoft algorythm (*as long as the machine has a configured Network adaptor). Uniqueness is acheived by combining together hardware information from the network card with date and time information gathered at the time of creation.