hello Paul,

> How is Firebird installed - server or application?

Firebird 1.5 SS final installed as a service

> How are you starting the guardian - automatically
> boot or manually?

Automatically at boot. I have given a look at it just now, after a reboot,
with the Services applet:

Firebird Guardian: Default Instance - Automatic - Stopped
Firebird Server : Default Instance - Manual - Stopped

Then I have manually started the Guardian service and then:

Firebird Guardian: Default Instance - Automatic - Started
Firebird Server : Default Instance - Manual - Started

These are the command line parameters for the two services:

Guardian: C:\Programmi\Firebird\Firebird_1_5\bin\fbguard.exe -s
Server : C:\Programmi\Firebird\Firebird_1_5\bin\fbserver.exe -s

I begin to suspect that there could be a problem in Windows XP Pro. The
same thing (more or less) happens with a small control panel of my 3Com
Gigabit network card. It should normally be loaded at startup and reside in
the taskbar, but it succeeds approximately 1 time out of 30, the other 29
times it is not loaded at all, but this is only a small utility and the NIC
works correctly even without it. This problem has never occurred with the
old Windows 2000 Pro and all applets were correctly loaded at startup,
Firebird 1.5 and NIC panel included.

Regards
Salvatore