Geoff,

> I may be getting off topic, it just struck me as odd.

I think you are just driving back the discussion to the real problem.
I'll add some more information on my setup (why must people start new
threads for old topics, btw? :-)).
My test databases were indeed created with IB6.0 (beta, I think). The
fact that all the databases I tried were created with IB6 *and* they
were all dialect 3 databases made me think that dialect 3 had something
to do with the problem (I can connect to help.gdb, which I think is
created by Firebird as part of the build process and is a dialect 1
database).

The error is "invalid file handle", not "The process cannot access the
file because it is being
used by another process.". I don't know for sure if they are related,
but I don't see how they could.

The error pops up only with IBO, and furthermore it leaves IBO in an
inconsistent state, as I outlined in my first post. Could it be related
with the changes in isc_database_info? Could it be that IB_SQL tries to
connect two times under certain circumstances? Just shooting in the
dark. Back to the call stack trace.
Ciao
--
____
_/\/ando