Sorry, i didn't explain myself well

I have a legacy Foxpro system based on free tables that sits on a client's network. They have a web server which needs to display the latest status from that database. the web server sits outside the client's firewall and I am informed that the only way that I get get access through the firewall is to use an access method that provedes an ip address and a port. As far as i can see only the oledb server allows that.

I am currently testing the foxpro com object on my own network and am hitting the problem that if I use your second method of identifying the database folder everything works Ok but if I use your first method i get an "invalid file or folder" fail from the oledb server. I have an identical test database folder on my Foxpro development machine and if I access that data using either method it works file, hence my suspicion that it is a permissions problem.

However it is useful to know that you don't have problems accessing data on a Win2k server.

Hope this make the problem clearer

Andrew