You guys are amazing!
There was a combination of problems I think. Textpad must have been saving out unicode 8. After I recreated the file in Wordpad and saved out it out in unicode everything worked.
I also moved the handling of the window creation out of the init event and into OnEvent_MyStatusChange.
The window test tutorial should be changed to reflect Leonardo's observation about not creating windows inside the init event unless you handle MessengerStart.
Thanks again guys! And if i ever to create something worthwhile I will be sure to post it
Cheers