Mark,

I actually haven't looked at the Registery yet but will do so. I looked at the ODBC.ini and looked at the string that was created by the ODBC Administratior and I believe the Help for SQLConfigDataSource() lists a lot of the settings.

My app deals with mailing lists and my users are anywhere and everywhere so I have no idea what form their mailing lists are in. For ASCII files I have already created a very nice Import/File Conversion routine but for everything else I had to have my users Export/Save_As any non-dbf file into a dbf format before my app could use it. Many times the user of my app was not the person who created the mailing list and may not have known anything at all of the software that created it. My goal is to just have the user select their mailing list, more or less regardless of the type, and let my app make the connection behind the sceens with as little user input as possible. If user input is needed, then I want it under my control and not be one of Microsoft's dialog boxes which tend not to be very intuitive for a computer novice.

I'm assuming that I will probably need to have my app do a driver installation at setup so that I can be assured that a specific driver version with a specific driver name is available or maybe only install if a FILE() can't find the driver that I want to use. Anyway, all of that is getting ahead of myself. I first need to get a hardcoded prototype working first and then start with the error checking, configuration, etc.

I appreciate the feedback. When you are brand new at something and all alone, it's nice to know that there is someone you can turn to.

I'll try not to be too pesky but I hope you don't mind me comming back every once in a while with a question.

Ed

>I still think you need to setup an ODBC Data source for one of your Access DBs. Then look in the registry to see what it did. These keys and values in the registry will help you with your connection via VFP code and functions.
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>If you do not have many Access DBs, you could create a VFP DBC, add an ODBC DSN and a VFP connection for each Access DB, then start creating remote views to these Access tables. If you need to make the Access tables updateable, you can make the views in VFP updateable, identify the key and updateable fields, etc. I think you will find this much easier, although you would have to make sure each user has an identically named ODBC DSN created for each connection (which can be done by code the first time your VFP app is executed).
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>>Mark,