If you package your subvis properly passing out the reference itself is not only unnecessary but wrong. Thinking in term of information hiding, the data type of the reference is information that should be private to the Vi's for dealing with the queue.
Have one place where the queues you need are created and their references are buffered then everywhere else create subvis that obtain a reference to the queue (by name) do whatever they need to do and then release the reference.
Mike...
