>So a fully qualified UNC expressed by the DCOM object will implicitly use server side resources. Is this true even if I don't have browse services on the remote machine? (its on a differnt network segment).

If you can access the server interactively then DCOM can access it too...
You need a share to connect to even if it's the Admin share (C$,D$ etc).

>What overhead in bandwidth do I incure by using DCOM instead of a simple datagram architechture?

There's a fair amount of overhead. Don't know what you mean by datagram -
what? pure TCP/IP, named pipes, network packet?

DCOM incurs several round trips before a connection is made. VFP uses
IDispatch, which means at least two trips are required to get the type
information and making the invokation on the server.

>DCOM is connection based, it seems that I could handle more concurrent clients with a datagram / connectionless approach?

DCOM is not terribly efficient, but it's easy to work with. Once a
connection has been established it uses RPC which is pretty efficient
for data transfer. RPC determines the actual transport mechanism based
on the configuration.

+++ Rick ---