depending on how far you go with this Kerry, you might want to entertain a schema, this will help with serialisation and also enable you to create wrapper classes for your xml objects using
XSD or LiquidXML et al. This way you work with your objects using c# as usual, you read in the whole XML and have at it in a more 'natural' way.
I'm currently using LiquidXML for a project now with many object types (60 odd) that I read/write and edit in dwg files. I imported in the schema into LiquidXML and it wrote the c# library and source code and documentation for me. It's has many more features for XML including creating schemas from sample xml files for instance.
If you want to look into this further just holler, I could do you an example or you can download the trial and I'm a call away if you need a hand.
