My application has no problems connecting and using 64 SQL Server apart from the inability to use ACE drivers. My application created views which use OPENROWSET to access external data. These OPENROWSET vqueries use the ACE drivers which don't work in this environment because (I guess) the views are running under the 64 bit SQL Server instance. Sure, my application (the actual executable) could open connections directly on the external data source using ACE but thats not the way it works. It uses SQL views with OPENROWSET, it is this situation that requires a separate 32 bit instance of SQL, the 32 bit instance holds the views which because the instance is 32 bit can reference and use the 32 bit ACE drivers. The 64 bit instance uses a linked server to ref0erence the data in the external files via the OPENROWSET views on the 32 bit instance.