Jim,
 
I have finally solved what I think is the last barrier to using MySQL as the database for the program. You have to specify client side cursors for the ODBC driver that MySQL uses. Like the old Access and some old DOA drivers. Data returned from SQL queries were pretty flakey and confusing before I stumbled on this solution.
 
I will do some more testing the next couple days, but I think you can now run the program with MySQL in instead of M$SQL if you prefer. Trapping the backslash escape characters and formating stored dates in the YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format was the easy part.
 
I have also found some programs which claim they can convert VB 6 code to pure Java code. I will check those out soon.
 
Gene