Thanks for your response Phil

I did a debug.print of the tdf.Connect and of the strConnect variable defined by the value in tdf.Connect but it drops the driver so I stopped using the variable and used the whole string for tdf.Connect

I was wanting to use the variable so I could loop through the tables of each db and copy them to local tables, the string would vary depending on which db the linked table belonged in

That missing driver was the only difference between the successful connect on the one database and the failure on the other

Either way the 3151 error is still thrown on the one database. Using the exact same code on the other, (with different connection string parameters) it failse. I have some other code in another procedure which succesfully uses an ADODB connection but was trying to avoid 2 different connection mechanisms and stick to DAO.