Dan, You wrote: 2. Is this fact -- or anything else about these globals -- documented anywhere? I looked through the Zope Book, ZQR, HowTos and Tips to no avail. I also searched the online help. I did find a _reference_ to AUTHENTICATED_USER and to REQUEST.AUTHENTICATED_USER in a function called SecurityGetUser() but no real information on the use of the AuthenticatedUser class itself. I have about the same problem: I want to get the current user name in a python script and put it there in a database. Allmost this works: user = container.REQUEST.AUTHENTICATED_USER.getUserName() But it rises an error if I want to print the user out: 'cannot add type "ImplicitAcquirerWrapper" to string' Any suggestions? regards Armin