skibum, you had the right idea. Putting the schema into the schema collection made a vast speed difference in the overall performance. Even though I still have to create a validating reader each time thru the loop, the performance hit is no where near as bad as when I was reading the schema in each and every time. Thanks for the nudge into the correct direction.

I still wish, though (listening C# XML team??) that the reader had a way of loading a new XML fragment instead of having to create it each time. How about adding a Clear() and Load() method to the Reader?!