Guy,

>Can GUIDs be created by any device/OS or are they just an MS thing? I ask because I wonder if - down the road - it will be reliable to expect that any type of device can be used as a front end that can create it's own PKs for new records?

Good question! I first thought that this is only a MS thing, but Oracle and MySQL support GUIDs and they can be run on different platforms. So this gave me th first hint, that they should be available on more platforms.

AFAIK they're not special to MS operating systems. You may want to check the following links:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9629399/apdxa.htm#tagtcjh_34
http://www.opengroup.org/dce/info/draft-leach-uuids-guids-01.txt

Since the Opengroup deals with them, I think we can assume that they are not MS specific :)

Regards,
Armin