We investigate different treatments of continuum states in a simple structure case: two particles moving in a one-dimensional mean field and interacting via a density-dependent short range residual interaction. We find that in procedures that involve continuum discretization a rather large basis has to be used in order to get convergence to the exact results, in particular for the radial dependence of the two-particle wave function. This may lead to unpracticable situations in the case of many interacting particles in the continuum. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.