Thanks for responding and of course I'm not insulted. I appreciate all the help I can get. Your question raises another problem I had. First of all, when you say "start the DB Engine", I guess you mean issue cd c:\mysql\bin and issue the command "mysql -u userid =h localhost -p" and then give the password when prompted. I did this on day 1 and: 1) gave myself an ID and permissions and 2) built a database. The next day and also today the same command failed when I entered my password. So when the java program was running, no mysql session was logged on. So does that mean that no server was running? mysql must be started when a program tries to connect? By the way, I installed mysql on my PC (which is not a server), and I'm running on my PC. Is that a problem? Next question, I'm running on localhost, but what port am I running on, and does matter? In case I just have the wrong password, do you know how I can fix it? Thanks, Stan