im having trouble with evap under vaccum. xylene when hot just seems to melt everything  hight temp/presure fuel hose has lasted the longest but i still have to replace it after a few hours...any sugestions???

When vacuum distilling, there aren't ANY hot xylene supposed to go as far as the vacuum tubing. Perhaps you should re-think your apparatus?

But to answer your question, neoprene rubber should take the abuse, and definitely teflon, but the price of the latter is excessive.

copper/metal tubing would not be effected, if your going glass to metal then i guess youd still have to splice things together with splints of flexible hose/hose clamps, so im not sure that would be of any advantage.
but if all you have is organics then you might as well go to an all metal setup

this may be the wrong forum but swiaj is about to extract ephedra with methanol and is wondering about using metal or plastic instead of glass...swiaj would like to learn these apparatus/reagent compatabilities from the ground up...rhodium, can you sum this subject up in 25 words or less??...are there simple generalisations to be made such as np solvents dont like metal or is it horribly messy and not so simple?...i don't know if np's like metal or not...maybe they like hip hop??/...ho ho...ok, going now,
                               aj

Metals stand up to all non-polars, but depending on the metal they are more or less sensitive to acidic and basic solutions.

If you UTFSE there has been posted a lot of plastics chemical resistance charts, such as this:

http://www.visserssales.com/Chemline/ChemGuide.htm

If you google on "plastic chemical resistance" you'll find even more...

auntyjack:
copper has pretty good chem resistance, doesn't even react with HCl, about the only stuff it reacts with is oxodizing acids like HNO3, H2S04, and oxidizers like halogens (Cl2 etc),and annie ammonia but as far as xylene, methanol etc, its should be fine.