Has this been already discussed ? (I search the archive without
finding anything relevant - or I missed it).

I have 2 Windows XP (retail version build 2600) workstations where
InterBase/Firebird exhibit the very same behaviour : when a client
application connects to a database, there is a loooong pause (in the
order of 10 to 30 seconds !) before it succeeds. After that, for as
long as the database connection is kept open, everything runs fine.

I use only tcp/ip kind connections. And yes there have been much
changes in the Winsock stack. Is the GDS32.DLL linked against
Winsock 1 or Winsock 2 libraries ? If Windock 1, it may well be the
problem. The compatibility layer of XP to allow Winsock 1
applications to run de-stabilize more than one application.

--
Olivier Mascia