just to add...

This is what i'm currently using:

                    XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(_fileName);
                    reader.WhitespaceHandling = WhitespaceHandling.None;

                    while(reader.Name != "Employee"  && !reader.EOF)
                        reader.Read();

                    while(reader.Name == "Employee")
                    {
                        _shareCollection.Add(reader["name"]);
                    }

                    reader.Close();

Unfortunately, control never comes out of the while loop....

Hi,

Well, first, this is not valid XML as it has multiple root elements.  It  
should be something like this instead

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Employees>
<Employee name="john" />
<Employee name="peter" />
<Employee name="mark" />
</Employees>

You can then load it into an XmlDocument and use SelectNodes to grab the  
Employees, and then read the name attribute

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load(@"C:\Employees.xml");

XmlNodeList elements = doc.SelectNodes("Employees/Employee");

ArrayList list = new ArrayList();

foreach (XmlNode node in elements)
    list.Add(node.Attributes["name"].Value);