I forgot to say - I am using version 14.1 and using the Saxon EE option for transformation. I have an xml file with an association to a Relax NG schema. Whenever I apply an XSLT transformation to it, it seems to validate the file against the schema before it carries out the transformation. The reason I suspect this is I am using a remote schema so it takes a long time to carry out the transformation compared to when I remove the schema association. I even have schema caching turned on, but that also seems to be malfunctioning, as the time necessary to validate does not decrease upon repitition. Thanks, Tara