> I swear I am about ready to go back to stone tablets and a chisel. I
> finally gave up on getting the embedded database to work and now I

Really ??? Just unzip it and rename fbembed.dll to fbclient.dll.
That's all, now you can use it. It did not work for you ?

> having trouble changing the SYSDBA password. I have searched the docs,
> the net, and this forum and not one of the examples seem to work.

To get the best documentation just execute
gsec ?

> Most successful attempts:
>
> C:\Program Files\Firebird\bin\>gsec -database "localhost:C:\Program
> Files\Firebird_2_0\Security2.fdb -modify sysdba -pw masterkey -user
> sysdba -pw abcdefgh
> WARNING - maximum 8 significant bytes of password used
> password already specified

You just need to specify under which account you want to login:
-user sysdba -password masterkey
and which user's password you want to change:
-modify sysdba -pw abcd

Ivan
http://www.volny.cz/iprenosil/interbase/