these are all great ideas... thanks

I think what I'll try to do is have the main DB on the server, let the winsock control (totally forgot about that one) determine what gets sent and where, then just hold the values in variables... play with the variables and when the player closes down the program, before it is unloaded, upload all the info. No data files or DBs at all on the client side will help keep from letting cheats get threw. Thanks for all the feedback.