>Yes, that's doable from within his application; his concern is access to data from other than his own application.
>

Well... it sounded to me that the specific concern was being able to view passwords... so, my suggestion was, don't store them, use windows security services.

Of course, if someone can access the files, why would they bother trying to get a password, they could just view the info they wanted...

If this is a concern, then just bitshifting the password will only keep the honest people honest... full encryption is in order in this case, or, this is a compelling reason to move to an SQL server... SECURITY!

Of course, there is a second way to secure the files without SQL, that is sending data access through an AutoMation server. The COM object has access to the data, but the user doesn't. But, this is another topic.

BOb