>The concern with the number of connections is only in relation to licensing--and then I'm not sure what 'per seat' actually means when looking at the number of handles anyway. A single 'seat' could easily have 5 'handles' -- at least I sometimes do interactively, although the application shouldn't need that many.

Same concern was in play and this use of a handle in the connectstring clause has solved most of it. There may be other problems with counting connections to a SQL server, specially when it doesn't dismiss a dropped connection - in case it may be reestablished, and when the app establishes a new one instead, for a while it counts as two.