PaulS,
Without burdening anyone else - or you - with my problems - mostly a function of my 15% competence - is it reasonable to expect to be able to read an SD file on one arduino and via a 9600 bps serial connection copy it to an SD file on a second arduino? even if the transport requires SoftwareSerial?
if this should be possible, I'll just keep banging on it until i get it to work.