>Eventually I'll move the app from 5 to 6, and will consider doing something like this, but another question or two, if you don't mind:
>
>Is there any performance hit for the COM and the MTS? And is the MTS difficult to learn & apply, considering the way my data is all split up? (Partly for security, partly for size)

There are different issues that you need to worry about. The biggest is, how do you get the data from one tier to another. MTS is very easy to setup and use. Performance will vary depending on your server, network, traffic, users, etc.