Here's a thing. Those problems I was having with some sort of Zope-killing page have been tracked down to a particular zSQL method. The zSQL method is duff, in that is should fail - the perils of late-night coding on decaf, I fear - but it should fail neatly with a Zope error, not crash out the Python interpreter and force some poor schmuck to restart the limping Zope process. I don't know whether this is a peculiarity to my setup (NT4SP6, IIS4, Zope2, Access97 database) or a general problem; perhaps some of the developer-hatted Zopistas could take a look? The poison SQL is this: select (<dtml-var field>, field2) from tablename where (field1= <dtml-sqlvar parameter1 type=string> and <dtml-var field> <> '') Where two parameters are passed to the method, namely "field" and "parameter1". parameter1 is fed in as a dtml-sqlvar and searches against the table's field1 column. field is passed in as a dtml-var and is used to define which of the table's other fields is retruned. field2 is always returned. What makes the SQL duff is the parentheses around the fields in the first part of the SELECT. They're not required and if you remove them to produce the zSQL below, it works fine. select <dtml-var field>, field2 from tablename where (field1= <dtml-sqlvar parameter1 type=string> and <dtml-var field> <> ' So why does it kill Python? I'm only vaguely concerned now that I've found the fault, because of course the SQL is canned and no developer could get their hands on it - but this experience redoubles my acceptance of the notion of canned SQL! AndyG "I don't suffer from stress. I'm just a carrier."