At 08:40 AM 18/02/2009, you wrote:

>Much appreciated, but nothing obvious.

Have you thought about making a copy of fbembed.dll and placing it in your app directory as fbclient.dll?

I'm still on the tack that the uninstalled software might have had a Fb server running and the previous history was that your fbembed.dll-renamed-to-gds32.dll is still being informed somewhere to connect to a server as an ordinary client (e.g. an improperly cleaned-out registry entry?)

Actually, another thought about this: you could grab a copy of instreg.exe from the same Fb version full server distro, copy it into the \bin directory of your app installation and run it from there. If you don't have a \bin directory, create one. You could also try copying the msvc*71.dll files to there.

./heLen