Thank you all for your replies.

When I was googling last night, I found that the file header could be read as you suggested, Kleinma, but I didn't know if that could be done in Visual Basic 2005.

Basically, what I am trying to accomplish is to make kind of a smart program that the user can select a database file and the program will identify the type of database it is (within a predefined amount of types) and use the correct connection string to open it.

I was looking at connectionstrings.com, and saw that access 2007 uses a different type of connection string that previous versions of access, so that is what started my need to make the program "smarter".

Can the file header be read using visual basic 2005? If not, is there another way to do this. I am expecting my users to not be smart enough to know what type of access database they have.

Thank you for your help.