And the answer shall come...this is it.  This is why I love the hell out of .NET.  I tell this to my students when I teach .NET, but each day I use the Framework I start to live it even more.  Sure, there are things you fight with, there are things you hate, but really when it comes down to it: A LOT of good thought was put into the Framework.  There are Utility Classes galore.  (Of course, there's no HashMap, but that's another day)

What I did in a cheesy moment (a 3am moment) of frustration:

public unsafe static byte[] UIntToBytes(uint UIntIn)
{
    //turn a uint32 into 4 bytes
    byte[] fourBytes = new byte[4];
    uint* pt = &UIntIn;
    byte* bt = (byte*)&pt[0];
    fourBytes[0] = *bt++;
    fourBytes[1] = *bt++;
    fourBytes[2] = *bt++;
    fourBytes[3] = *bt++;
    return fourBytes;
}

Here's what it looks like now (in VB.NET):

Public Shared Function IntToBytes(ByVal IntIn As Integer) As Byte()
    Return BitConverter.GetBytes(IntIn)
End Function

I can't believe I stooped to writing unsafe :) code to do something as simple as getting the Bytes out of an Integer.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.