In the installation program for my application, I check the user id
and password for validity before attempting to see if the database
already exists and making the decision to create a new one or update
an existing one. I do this because you get the error telling you that
the database does not exist before you get the error telling you that
the user id / password is bad.

I do this by attempting to open the security database since that must
always exist. A problem arises in FB2.0 because we are no longer
allowed to connect directly to the security database.

How can I validate the user id and password without having a database
to connect to?