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ADDR can only be used with invoke (but of course you can use offset with invoke too). In all other cases, use offset. But this does not apply to local variables, as they don't have a fixed offset. If you have this code:

.data
var    dd    500
.code
mov   eax, offset var

this will assemble as something like:

mov eax, 403000h 

Where the 403000h is the offset of the variable. This offset is fixed, it never changes. But as local variables are stored on stack, their location is not always the same (they even don't exist outside the procedure :-)). They are accessed by using a relative offset to ebp, like this:

somefunction proc 
LOCAL localvar:DWORD
mov eax, localvar

the mov eax, localvar will assemble as:

mov eax, dword ptr 

Now you can see why you can't put the offset of the local variable in eax, the offset = ebp-4. To get the offset, you need to put ebp-4 in eax. This is what lea (load effective address) does:

lea eax, localvar

this assembles to:

lea eax, 

this is the same as : eax = ebp - 4 (note that the brackets in lea don't have the same meaning as in mov etc.). Thomas