I am not the DBA so unable to provide you with a true answer and the person I need to ask is not in work for a while. From vague memory I beleive it was something to do with licence (not XIR2) and the resolve was to set the file attribute to READ only. We then had no further ODBC problems. I think we are now using Data Direct 5 , but not sure if this is to do with SQL server connections. If I know more I will add a new post reply.