> Pulling the power cord was an example (the server in question has UPS),

I had a hunch it is not your normal shut-down procedure :-)

> I am running a test at the momement, (with forced writes off), I have
> inserted approx 1.5 GB into an empty database (and rising), and the GDB file
> is still only 3MB (I know about the explorer display issue).

The data must be somewhere. Do you have 2GB RAM ?

Ivan
http://www.volny.cz/iprenosil/interbase