At 01:31 PM 14/02/2004 +1100, you wrote:

>If not then there seems no reason for SS to do this on each connection.

It doesn't. Try modifying something in firebird.conf with SS running (e.g.
set UDFAccess to NONE) and then do a new login without restarting the
server. For my test (assuming you have ib_udf installed), do
select ascii_char(64) as retval from rdb$database

You'll see that it coolly returns '@'.

/heLen