I thought I already posted a reply but it doesn't seem to have come up, here I go again.
A test of the DSN completes successfully. I've tried deleting and recreating it as a system and user DSN.
I had this all working with an access database, but the max 255 character in the message field was causing truncation (worked without the message field though!).
I think i'm going to write this up in VBS and use a DSN-less connection. I think it has somehting to with the ODBC DSN and the MSDE instance being on the same system. I read something about that but I haven't really been able to find any helpfull information on how to get around it.
Regarding 2.2, will going out to a machine on the network to get the dll's be fairly lightweight network traffic wise? Will the data in the dll's be maintained locally after the first time this is done for each unkown message or will the remote server need to be accessed each time an unknown message arises?
I'm still trying to decide if it would make more sense to run log parser against the backed up log files locally on each server and then output the data to CSV, transfer the csv's to a central location and use them as the input for the database. Many of the servers are in different sites, so WAN traffic is always a concern.
Thanks for your response, I appreciate it.