hello all,

well, I can say that the problem has been resolved finally (phew... :-).
The culprit was another dll used for collations. Once removed and recreated
the database all works fine, also under 98SE and Millennium. I'll try to
contact the author to see if it's possible to correct this problem. Luckily
I don't need special collations for this application.

Regards
Salvatore