Between fits of hair pulling trying to resolve the problem I described
in my previous post, I stumbled over a behavior inconsistency of the
immediate window.

Using debug.print from within the code gave wrong results (that is, 0
for a numeric, "" for a string).
At the same time, typing ?expression in the immediate window gave the
correct results. (expression being a value of a DOMDocument element).

I also asserted that the assignment "=" operator actually worked, but
the values it assigned were 0 for numeric and "" for string.