one idea that i have is to force our clients to provide the ip addresses of servers that will have the component installed... in the same dataserver that they're querying, this info will be stored... and like you said, i plan to put as much of my code as is possible in this component... and one of the functions in the code will look into this table of ip addresses and clients and make sure that it can allow itself to continue... i figure this could be done pretty easily...

we're also in a situation where as client base grows, we will have to look for an outside provider for a sql server, and the difference between income and expenses wouldn't allow for a dedicated server... which becomes a security issue in its own right... and i'm pretty sure that shared servers allow only one sql account... but i could be wrong...

thanks!