Helen,

> >My first thought to this was... WOW, surely this is a serious (high
> >priority) bug...
> >If just connecting with different strings can cause a database corruption
> >then surely this should be considered major?
>
> It is major. It's not an InterBase bug but a Windows "undocumented feature" that was discovered about 18 months ago and found to cause this dangerous and otherwise inexplicable behaviour.

well, the concept of drive's current directory in FAT file systems is
known for some 20 years by now. ;-)

> The BDE will let you set up an alias with the bad path. IB Objects raises an exception and won't attempt to connect.

Mmm... My guess is that IB should open the file with exclusive access
and let the user get away with whatever connect string the OS does
support.
In addition, there are people who use IB's "current drive" feature, and
use connect string in the form "servername:\path\to\database.gdb". Not
that I'd ever use such a connect string, but I have a strong feeling
that bugs, whenever possible, should be corrected rather than worked
around.
Ciao
--
____
_/\/ando