Bob:

"So given that list of options, considering how many of them should take less than 20 minutes to implement (Like remote desktop or VNC) I have to ask why you would ever want to risk the valuable data and resources of that SQL server? "

I did not say that *ALL* of the could be done in 20 minutes   just that several things like Remote Desktop are fast to setup and use.

I sure would bow to any coder who could do a custom binary in even 20 hours !  I'd expect that to be more like 20 work days @ 8 hours a day depending on how complex it was.

as for what you have I certainly don't think you can or will ditch it .... but perhaps it's time to think about a future upgrade where you use a WebService, it would for example give you WSE which can deal with the plain text user name and password. and you can also reduce the number of open connections and database hits to scale even better.

an example:  asp.net and web services can cache a "Lookup Table" in local memory and return that in-place of a database connection.

over the course of a day's work that could amount to huge numbers of requests filled with only a few hits on the sql server.

how many tables like that do you have? that change seldom and are read often?

Denny.