SO...started developing the BOI app on a VM that had all the Crystal 2011 versions on it. Lee was also on the same server, probably running a different version of Sage 100. this likely confused the code into returning the wrong path from the registry/DSN. I set up another VM with only the right version on it and the BOI app now runs fine. Be careful using code from Sage that does this - better to get the real paths you need from a .ini file.