George,

Are you saying that IBO has a memory leak of some sort in its connect
routine? I don't use IBO, but I doubt this would be so. Perhaps you
could post some sample code that causes this leak to the IBO list and
they will tell you if you are not freeing something.

As far as your problem, as Helen suggested, by far the easiest and
most reliable way to see if a connection exists is to connect and see
if it caused any exception. Of course you could use an indy client to
connect to port 3050 of the host machine for a similar test, but why
use another library to do a job which won't be as thorough?

Adam