I think that some of us may be cut of from Borland now anyway.

I have been trying to replace ib_general with bpi_general since the
weekend, but it refuses to accept the confirmation numbers which have
been supplied automatically, and my requests for help have not had a
reply.

I have spent 15 years using Borland tools, and despite every attempt
of Microsoft to get me to change ( I still think OWL was far superior
to VCL ) I will continue to use them. I certainly did not stay with
'Enterprise' when I upgraded to Builder 5, as it only added Microsoft
baggage that I had no interest in, and I was already paying for
Interbase 5.6 separately. I will look at Builder 6 with care, and may
get off the roundabout, but probably because I will start running
Linux along side.

Progress has to be built on a stable base, and since Microsoft have
yet to make W2k stable ( Delphi newsgroups have just switched back to
NT4 because of problems! for example ), and there are still several
similar, but not identical versions of Windows, life is difficult.
People say there are more versions of linux, but at least most things
there can be changed, and fixed, while windows just refuses to oblige.

I come from an age where the operating system provided a base onto
which functionality was bolted as required. (Dec PDP and VAX). The
core Interbase is good, and we can bolt on our own goodies ( SP and
UDF's ), security needs to be addressed, but for my own applications
(at present) the network is providing the security, so what there is
just gets switched off. Web access direct to the database is one
thing, but intermediate levels may be a better place to provide strong
security, with a secure path to the actual server. If the hooks are
right, then bolt-ons work, otherwise like ActiveX it just becomes a
home for the hacker.

If Borland don't want any futher business from me, then fine, I would
much rather stick with what I have working now anyway, and get the
bugs fixed, which is what I am seeing from Firebird. Like many others,
my 'support' from Borland has long since finished, so I do not have to
worry about threats of losing it. When I PAID for help, I never
actually got the problems fixed, unlike IBObjects where either a fix
appears, or I can track and fix it myself.

***
This has take two hours to write, so the flow is a bit broken, I had
an interesting problem on IB_Connection, but I will post that to the
other list.