At 12:29 PM 24/06/2003 +0000, you wrote:

>Helen,
>
>Thanks for that.
>
>One very quick point of clarification - can I reference 127.0.0.1 in
>the connection string, or must it be 'localhost'?

That depends on the Winsock version. Winsock 2 supports direct IP address
resolution. Winsock 1 doesn't. For Win95 you need the Windows !Plus
upgrade 2 (or is it 3?) to get Winsock 2 support. I think the initial
distro of Win98 had Winsock 1. 98SE has 2.

In any case, host name said to be faster on Windows, because it gets
matched directly to the stored IP address and field-by-field mask-matching
follows. If you use the IP address in the connection string, winsock
parses it first as a string, breaks out the mask fields and puts them back
together again before doing the mask evaluation. Why, I don't know. I
recall someone (maybe Ivan Prenosil) reporting this ridiculous fact from an
MSD paper a year or two ago.

Helen