Hi Sergey...

I'm sorry for the delayed acknowledgement of your kind response. I didn't get an email so thought no one had responded.

The extra handles created when using the string is logical but I'm still surprised by the overhead it creates. It seems like one might want to avoid using strings.

Regarding my second question, I thought the Shared property was set to True but perhaps it isn't set correctly - or in the right place. The documentation on SQLSETPROP seems a bit sketchy. I've seen examples where the first parameter (handle) is 0, implying that the property would be set for the current and all future connections. Alternately, the first parameter can be a specific handle. I would expect this to set the property only for the specified connection. What is the proper way to set connection properties?