>Never really used Access so I'm just guessing, but I don't think JET was ever intended to properly support multiple access (using it as a data store for a web app could get nasty quite quickly :-} ) so, if you are not doing that, one of the primary benefit of connection pooling disappears. But if that takes away one of the upsides of pooling it doesn't mean there is a downside to enabling it. >Maybe it's just a legacy thing - I've a feeling earlier versions may not have supported pooling so changing the default later would have been dangerous ? > >Dunno really........