There are tons of different reasons why you may come up with these issues.
But usually it's either:
- Some non-standard C in the headers (or newer C standard that eC doesn't officially support yet, working our ways up from C89)
- Conflicts and clashes with existing eC constructs (even though in theory this should not happen, hopefully the next rework of the compiler will help with this!)
Normally though, it's trivial to work around these issues, so just bring them to my attention right away so you don't have to get depressed or discouraged

About this MS Access stuff, what API are you using? Is it going through ODBC? Have you started using EDA yet, which is our database abstraction layer with active records?
It would be nice if we could put together that ODBC driver for EDA!
Regarding SmartFileOpen, I have literally tons of fixes and improvements to the HTTP protocol and to the sample browser, and I even have https support now! I'm looking forward to pushing these commits, probably this weekend! The browser is now almost usable, if you ignore the lack of cookies, CSS and JavaScript (And the even fancier stuff like Flash and HTML 5)

But it's really not bad at all now, the crashes and hangs seem to be gone! For what was meant to be a small sample on how to use the HTTP(S) file handler and the HTMLView control... it could actually turn into a great browser one day, perhaps as a part of my envisioned eC web apps revolution

Cheers,
Jerome