> Also It seems to NOT crash when I run FB without the guardian as
> an application????

Are you sure about this?? All the guardian does is to restart the
service if it has crashed. Windows now has this ability in services.

Got to services

Double click "Firebird Server - DefaultInstance"
Click Recovery tab
If your failure options are set to something other than "Take no
action", then your service is probably being restarted.

As Helen stated a few days back now, Firebird may be at a state (due
to lack of resources) where it can not even write to the firebird.log.

If by some weird case guardian is causing it to crash, then just
disable it. It was designed in times before there was the ability to
set recovery options in the OS.

Adam