Dear jesuashok,

That's a good idea. At first it was giving access denied errors but when I fixed that and the errors disappeared, I assumed that it was working. Also because the connection with #* definitely works, I assumed that the connection line with #& also would. Probably this was naive.

The only thing is that I'm not sure how to test for the connection. I've read through the documentation again for the 3 related modules but cannot see anything that's obvious enough for my non-object way of thinking. These methods seem rather alien to me. Can you enlighten me or point me to the document that I should be reading?

thanks.