Tomasz,

At 11:46 PM 13/06/2003 +0000, you wrote:

>[snip **excellent**, professional, intelligent problem description]

When I encounter a problem where there is a BDE network, that's getting
fatal network errors after being stable for a long time, the first place I
go looking is for new piece of software that uses the BDE, even just if it
is installed on one workstation, i.e. not a network install.

One user on the network - not necessarily one who is using your application
- can break the BDE for everyone else as soon as s/he starts to do any
editing in Act!, TimeManager or whatever...get everyone to check their
workstations for one or more of the files pdoxusrs.* (.net, .lck) and/or
paradox.lck (.net). The one and only machine on the network where these
should be found is on the one where the netdir is located. Any other
machine(s) where you find these files is a network-crasher. Look into
those idapi32 configs for netdir anomalies.

There are other things -
10+ concurrent users is pushing the BDE. When you're using the BDE, the
max. connection limits of the db server become irrelevant. Look at the
size of the pdoxusrs.lck/paradox.lck files and check whether they are
sometimes getting too huge to handle the constant I/O; or are exhausting
the available drive space.

Big lock files can indicate that you have some rogue users who customarily
crash out of applications. Even as regular housekeeping, with this level
of users, you need to get everyone off once a day and delete the lock files.

The BDE version and IB driver in 5.1.1 are too old for an ODS 10
database. It's "marginal" for Dialect 1 and will cause some real problems
with Dialect 3. The "last-ever" BDE 5.2 and interbase driver, that shipped
with Delphi 6, are marginally better for Dialect 1 but can't handle the new
data types in Dialect 3. Whether it's the cause of the current problem or
not, it's a live bomb.

And more...

heLen