Thank you Charlie and Paul. I am giving serious consideration to all you've
each written, after all that's why I asked the question.

Rereading my own message, I see I left out something important:

I have over 800 COBOL programs currently in production.

They all worked fine on IB3.3U (AIX)
They all work fine on IB4.0C (AIX)
They all connect fine to an IB5.6 server. (WINNT)
They all fail when connecting to an IB6.0 server.(WINNT & AIX)

I'm not trying to introduce any new features in to Interbase, I'm just
trying to solve my current problem with the COBOL OPEN Cursor statement.

I'll keep digging in dsql/dsql.c and write back if I have any other ideas.

Thanks again,
...pat