Chuck,

> Does anyone have experience in comparing a IBO vs a BDE access speeds to
> give me a broad idea of what kind of speed increases we can get by
> replacing the BDE components with IBO?

you got enough replies by now to understand that the data access layer
is about the last thing to look at in your situation; you are trying to
make a C/S system behave as fast as an ISAM database (no way), you most
probably haven't got a properly designed/normalized database structure,
and by the timings you report it appears that you must be misusing the
BDE (ie multiple transactions, unprepared statements, live queries,
bidirectional cursors and the like).
Straight data reading (one transaction, no buffering, no
lookup/calculated fields or the like, prepared queries) can be almost as
fast with the BDE as it is with native access packages like IBO (at
least that's my experience). This is not the place for discussing BDE
tuning, though!
Furthermore, if you're using the standard Windows TreeView, you are
probably spending a slice of your time in updating it (given it's about
the slowest control known to mankind).
Finally, given that you can *very* easily and quickly convert from the
BDE to the IBO dataset-compatible components (request to Jason: why not
introduce an absolutely useless SessionName property, not even stored to
the dfm, just for added compatibility?), and that this will at least
free you from having to install the monster, I would do it even without
any expectation of performance gains.
HTH
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_/\/ando