Ivan,

> Are you people talking about your experience or just know it from hearsay ?

my experience, BUT not with IB6.

<SNIP thorough explaination>

> But what if IB completes "wrong" path itself (instead of waiting
> for Windows to do so) and convert it to fully specified file,
> and then uses this full path to compare connection strings?

sounds good.

> I do not like much the idea of opening db file in exclusive mode.
> One of the reasons is that one "bad" user can block access to the database
> to all "good" users if you connect with wrong string first.

in my view there aren't "good" and "bad" strings. Anything that will get
you to a database file is a good string.
If both alternatives solve the problem (and if one demonstrates that it
is still there in IB6), I'd go for the one you propose.
Ciao
--
____
_/\/ando