>>The program and the data belong together!
>
>I disagree with that. Data doesn't belong anywhere near the program, IMO.

I agree - what with programs off the network used with local data?

And... I surely wouldn't want to chase my documents in the directories where the apps which created them reside. Imagine a text document in ...\myWordPRocessor\doxs linked to a sheet in ...\mySpreadSheet\doxs, and then have to put that together for a presentation in yet another directory.

Yeh I know, this is database, not documents. I'd rather say, we have four groups of files:
a) the exe,and any dlls it uses privately
b) vendor supplied metadata
c) user's metadata
d) user's data

What goes where is actually an interesting question. I'd probably have a+b in one location, and c+d in another.