>Nancy

>First, I forgot to tell I'm using Win2003 Server Standard Edition as my development machine...

Doesn't make any difference.

>Second, there's no E: when going where you suggest because the E: drive is a physical local drive...

Well, you're the one who mentioned the E: drive. Every computer has a name, including the one your datasource will be on. You have to determine the computer name and the name of the shared directory and use that instead of a mapped drive.

>Third, what about the double backslashes needed in the connectionstring to represent a single backslash ?

Don't let the fact that you have two slashes confuse you. Each slash needs to be doubled, right? From the help file, I find the following example under the topic "String Literals":

string g = "\\\\server\\share\\file.txt";   // \\server\share\file.txt