I have found a work around, but its pretty geeky in terms of
implementation. Essentially I found that if I use the QueryDosDevice
api call, I can determine if the path is on a subst path, and then I
rewrite the path to the proper local. a hack, but it seems to work.
i still find it strange that I can access subst files in win2k, but
not in winXP with firebird 1.5

--Mike