<<<  Well don't waste your time.  >>>

I'm not saying who's right or who's wrong, just stating some
simple facts. Following is the response from Borland/Inprise
following my submission of a bug report relating this exact
problem. (The email is verbatim except for obvious bits.)

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Dear ****** *****,

Thank you for submitting your bug report.  While I am able to reproduce this
behavior and have notified R&D of this behavior, I must inform you that we
have intention address this issue for 2 reasons.

1. There is no need to use this driver. Use the Native driver and connect to
dBASE instead.
2. This is not a certified driver and none of our certified drivers have
this problem.

Thank you.
*****, Developer Support

Bug description sent:

TDatabase.Open() "hangs" (no return, no GPF, no blue-screen) when connected
to an ODBC DSN which uses the Microsoft dBase ODBC driver to connect to
dBase tables. Same DSN on same machine with other applications works
correctly. ONLY the Delphi application fails.

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Credit where it's due, at least they admit it doesn't work, unlike
someone else I can think of....

The down side is if you're in the same position as us, then
you need a homogeneous datasource for your application.
One would *think* that ODBC connections would be the
most versatile way to go...... Maybe they are, but if you're
using D5Pro, then I would suggest you follow the advice
I received from Bill Todd (thankyou for last time). Namely
if you must use a homogeneous connection solution, try
ADO. Any ADO solution. For the record we chose Timur
Islamov's DiamondADO, but I'm told that ADOExpress and
some others are just as good.

So in the interests of not having anyone else waste days
believing that they're losing their mind or done something
incredibly stupid, I'm just letting you all know the result....

Happy programming and enjoy the holiday season y'all....
:-)

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"If you think you know the answer,
then you don't understand the question !"
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