In working on a Visual Studio 2010 Solution that gives the user a visual rendering of the XML in a configuration (.config) file, I needed a way to determine the level of an XElement within a parent XElement.  Here is what I came up with:

	public static void FindElementLevel(XElement xParent, XElement xChild)
         {
             if (xParent == xChild) { return; }
             else
             {
                 ++level;
                 FindElementLevel(xParent, xChild.Parent);
             }
         }