At 11:43 AM 20/10/2006, you wrote:

>no insult was intended,
>
>I have learned everything I know about Firebird from this newsgroup,
>and the excellent Firebird book.
>
>I mentioned my situation because my symptoms also included:
>
> > >After that all accesses to the database fail, because the database
> > file 'is locked by another process'.
>
>This seemed to be caused by the bugcheck and no other extraneous source.

Actually, when you see the "software inconsistency" message it's not
a BUGCHECK unless the message says it is. This message occurs
whenever the engine finds itself in a state where it can't do what
it's been asked to...in Gerrit's case (and yours, I think) it has a
SEND request that it can't act upon. It's only trying to help us
find out what occurred to cause that condition. So "the problem"
here is (apparently) extraneous (file is locked by another process:
the engine can't do anything about that!) and the halt occurs as a
result of the consequent condition that the engine finds itself in.

This situation does come up with WinXP SP2 from time to time. Nessus
is a known "offender", along with possibly other security and
filesystem utilities that are apparently allowed to override
Superserver's exclusive write lock on the database file. Configuring
such utilities to bypass your database files usually fixes the
problem, if indeed the problem is caused by such a utility.

All that said, it doesn't mean that software inconsistencies arise
*only* from extraneous causes; nor even that encountering *this one*
with Superserver on XPSP2 is always caused by the same, single
thing. It does, nevertheless, provide places in the operating
environment to look for possible causes and eliminate them.

./heLen