Thanks to all that have responded to this post. These are some nice
ideas that I will investigate further.

I like the idea of having multiple instances of the service running at
the same time, and would consider updating the code to make this
happen in our situation. However, is this modification being
considered for the rumored 2.1 release (I see that it won't happen in
2.0.1 since it a bug fix release)? We won't be shipping product with
this requirement until later in 2007, so if a subsequent version of
Firebird will support this, I won't go through the work myself... :)


To those who posted that one possible solution would be to start
fbserver.exe as an application, I have some questions as well. While
considering this scenario, I was thinking of installing our own
service that (among other things) would start an instance of the
fbserver application when our service was initiated, and would then
elegantly shut down fbserver.exe when the service shut down. Some
questions on this:

1) How do I start the application and not have the FBServer icon show
up in the system tray? Is there a command line parameter for
fbserver.exe that would do this? We want it to be completely silent,
so no system tray icon would be great.
2) Is there anything special we need to do to make sure our version of
firebird.conf and the rest of the server support files is used? Does
FBServer.exe look in the startup directory first before looking into
the registry at the installed instance folder?
3) How would we elegantly shut down the instance of FBServer that we
created? Is there something like 'fbserver.exe -shutdown' command that
would do this? How do we make sure it's *our* instance that we shut down?
4) I am assuming that the Local Protocol (XNET) is not suitable for
this scenario, since (as far as I can see) it can't determine which
instance to communicate with... (presumably it can only work with the
'DefaultInstance'). Is this a fair assumption? Could my client
application still use the faster local protocol rather than resorting
to a slower TCP/IP connection (albeit a local one)?
5) A bit off topic, but still relevant... is there any experience in
this group as to how we could automatically detect an open port on the
client at install time? We would need to find this open port for our
instance of FBServer. We are using MS Visual C++ with VS 2005.

Thanks again in advance for the responses.