Jason,

> Why does the connection string solve this, is there some kind of blocking
> going on using the local connection?

I didn't mean to imply that the local connection was part of the
problem, just the relative path. Actually I would expect that giving a
full path (without the server designator) works too. IB has demonstrated
several times in the past it does not like much the many different ways
you have in Windows to refer to the same file (see database corruption
bug), so I was about guessing.

> If this is hte case, the backup and restore problems we have could be caused
> by this - interesting. We thought they were just random / intermit.
> problems.

I always use full paths and don't have the problem. I think I have batch
jobs that run on the server and they use the local connection (but full
path) without any problem. Do your routines happen to use relative
paths?
Ciao
--
____
_/\/ando