Firstly, may I add my thanks to the Firebird team.

OK, a successful installation should hardly be news. But I thought that if
I documented my experience as a relatively inexperienced Interbase user, it
would encourage others to take the plunge. The operating environment is
Windows 98.

The first pleasant surprise was that the download took under 10 minutes.
After reading the installation notes, I decided to install Firebird in
parallel with Borland's product so that I could easily switch back if I
messed things up. I created a folder \Program Files\Firebird and unzipped
the file into there - various sub-folders were created automatically.

Following Andy Canfield's advice in the installation notes I made the
following changes to the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Borland|InterBase\CurrentVersion\RootDirectory
changed C:\Program Files\Borland \Interbase to C:\Program Files\Firebird\

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Borland|InterBase\CurrentVersion\ServerDirectory
changed C:\Program Files\Borland \Interbase\bin\ to C:\Program
Files\Firebird\bin\

and the following further change to get ibserver to run on start up

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
changed C:\Program Files\Borland \Interbase\bin\ ibguard.exe to
C:\Program Files\Firebird\bin\ibguard.exe

Rebooted the machine, and tried to run my application. Got the message
'cannot attach to password database'. Established that ibguard and ibserver
were running.

Searched my archive of messages from this list, and deduced that the error
message was related to file isc4.gdb. Used Windows Explorer to discover
that this file existed in C:\Program Files\Borland\Interbase only. Copied
it into C:\Program Files\Firebird. Tried application again. Voila!

From my experiences, I infer that
1. Interbase Guardian in turn runs Interbase Server (but I don't know why
it is done in this way)
2. isc4.gdb is the file which contains the user names and passwords.
Yes, I know, you all thought everyone knew that. This is just to remind you
very gently that a few of us have a lot to learn. :>)

Anyway, Firebird is alive and well and running on my computer. Come on in,
Woody - the water's fine.

Peter Lawson