Martin you are great! If I had just opened the file with f=bsddb185.hashopen('filename',''w') it would have worked the first time. So now I will create wrapper classes around the file classes of bsddb185 and create the methods that I need to keep it consistent with bsddb. Another small difference I noted is that bsddb seems to auto sync() while bsddb185 does not, this is not a big issue though.
Thanks very much for all your input! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list