Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll look into some of these tomorrow.

What I'm trying to do is really basic, it's just to load a simple config file for a game engine, such as height, width, fov, stuff like that.

Do you want your XML file to be read at run time or compile time?

I've used Liquid XML Editor in the past which has a pretty decent xml parsing feature plus all the other usual fetaures like data binding, validation etc

Just an FYI:

Keywords you're looking for in your solution are Marshalling / Unmarshalling & Serialization / Deserialization which is a form of XML Data Binding. From what i'm understanding you want to deserialize / unmarshal the XML into an object reference then access it from there, rather than performing manual searches. A google search with these keyword terms will give you exactly what you're looking for