At 11:07 AM 3/04/2009, you wrote:

>I finally don´t know if the cause is really Windows XP (or XP SP3) or NOD32
>or both, but I follow Vlad´s suggestion of not using TCP/IP connections and
>it seems to be working. What I did is not to use HOST:path and instead I use
>\\HOST\path. For Terminal server I had to use \\127.0.0.1\\path because
>\\LOCALHOST\path doesn´t work. BTW does anybody knows why this doesn´t work?

AFAIU, neither localhost nor its IP address counterpart should work from a RDT connection. But if the external users are running their executable on the server itself, then their "remoteness" doesn't apply to the actual database connection. What surprises me is that TCP local loopback is available *at all* using the NetBEUI (or, more accurately, Named Pipes) protocol, since Named Pipes is not TCP/IP and is not meant to know about TCP Local loopback.

Best of all would be to use the server's own hostname, since this works for *both* TCP/IP and Named Pipes.

>And now I have a question:
>
>Is there any difference in using HOST:path against using \\HOST\path in
>performance, security, etc.?

Performance-wise, Named Pipes is not nice, since it's a very noisy protocol with low queuing priority against the Windows device-sharing protocol. It has been deprecated by Microsoft for many years: it survives only to provide legacy support for old Windows 3 and Win95 applications.

Also, as you can tell, your NOD32 firewall ignores it, which implies a security hole that you don't have with TCP/IP. In your shoes, I would want to fix up whatever is causing the TCP/IP problem and aim to get that back up and running.

./heLen