Frank, some notes:
(Phil's post didn't show up until now - I have some problems with my email
provider, so I will reply here)

> Phil Shrimpton wrote:
> >> do we really need the messages file (interbase.msg) or not?
> >
> > No. If it is not there, the error message you get will be less than
> > descriptive, but if your app is handling exceptions properly the user

should

> > never see 'pure' Firebird exceptions, just (hopefully) 'User friendly'

ones

> > produced by your app.

Are you sure about this? Did you found any doc about this? What do you mean
by 'less than descriptive'? All of us are parsing the messages inside the
application, so the question is if we need to change something on our parse.

> unless someone comes up with a case where it wouldn't work (or it violates
> IPL or so...), i'm tempted to adopt the method with the zipped dll inside
> the exe as a standard for all my forthcoming projects...

One small improvement will be deleting the file on application close, and
creating again every time the application starts. :-)

> One thing i'm really uncertain about is: what happens when two client apps
> use this method with the same gds32.dll, but stored under different
> filenames? i recall issues with Named Pipes for the FB *server*, are there
> similar probs for the client??

Good question!

Artur