Thanks guys.  I was really struggling to follow even the simple examples, but after writing the main functionality of populating a form in C#, I was able to understand the Automation class a bit further -- without the abstraction of AutoIT.  Then, I turned my attention back to AutoIT and with your guidance above and the C# experience, I wrote a simple UDF for my specific case.  Not only do I appreciate the more AutoIT native syntax, the speed is now fully reasonable.  The _UAI_SetVar and _UAI_Ac