A lot of people do what you're describing (the loader program) in a distributed web application scenario Elmer. I mean where not all the instances of the server app exist in the same place. And a lot of people do it in a Fox scenario as well. It's certainly feasible.

However I'm not sure if I understand this:

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This customer's main concern was to reduce maintenance when updates are sent, so that they would not have to update each workstation and to reduce network traffic by not running the the application from a network share.
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Is the maintenance table maintenance (IOW are there local tables to be updated) or are you saying that the application runs locally?

My point here is that there is no reason why the application can't run from a central network location and be accessed that way without involving TS. That way the local ports stay local. (BTW -- I'm not even sure that the redirection of ports adds a lot of overhead, if I were you I'd test this a bit and see if it is really an issue, just in case we're both confused <g>. What I said was overhead/contention was not the redirection of ports but the use of devices on the *server's* serial ports -- but this is not your scenario).

Can you describe your architecture, how the layers are distributed a bit more? Maybe you have other solutions to consider.

I do understand that there is network traffic involved in running the executable from a network location rather than on the local box. But depending on how you configure the app, where you place your temporary files, etc, this is not necessarily too bad.

The real issues would come if your "maintenance" updates were table updates and for some reason everybody needs individual sets of local tables to do their work, I suppose. But are you sure that this can't be handled all over on the network side, on user-specific directories? As I've already explained, we do this in the TS case and you could also do it in other network-centric caes. So your network guys would run your loader or scripts on all the user-specific directories on the server somewhere, they can easily backup everybody's data, etc, etc.

I think I'm writing this too fast to make it clear but I'm interested to see exactly where you're going <s>. TS or no...

>L<