On a lark I tried to connect to the databases on my computer with
flamerobin and the darn thing worked! I looked at some items in the NT
event logs and chased down a few web sites and just as a guess I tried:

"C:\Program Files\Firebird\Firebird_1_5\bin\isql.exe" -m
"localhost:c:\dbs\asv.fdb" -u "sysdba" -pas "masterkey"

So adding the reference to local host worked.

I immediately went to that big black and yellow book on FB (Helen, you
should e proud) and looked up the syntax for gsec and added the
references to the local host and the path to the security db:


C:\Documents and Settings\David>"C:\Program
Files\Firebird\Firebird_1_5\bin\gsec
.exe" -database "localhost:C:\Program
Files\Firebird\Firebird_1_5\security.fdb"
-user sysdba -password masterkey

That worked great!

So my question is why did the need to add the reference to localhost
suddenly appear after changing the account that the services run under?

What can I do get around this?

Thanks for the link to the tutorial, Simon! That worked exactly the
same under XP Pro as it dies under 2003, and it was exactly what I
needed. I don't think that I missed any details when I did it the
first time, but following the tutorial made the work very easy.

Simon and Helen, thank you for your help!