Informix error messages

I've been reading all these emails concerning poor documentation with the Informix connection products ( Istar, Inet, Iconnect, etc) and had to smile because I've been through the same thing and still don't have a good handle on what I'm doing every time I set up a new connection. But I've spent the last 2 days wrestling with a simple connection problem between my pc ( windows 95 ) and an instance of Informix on a Unix server, using the Ilogin utility provided with CLI. I'm fairly new to Windows 95, so it's not all intuitive to me. Depending on some indecipherable whim, I would get either a 930 error msg ( Cannot connect to remote host ) or a 25596 error ( Informixserver value is not listed in the sqlhosts file ). To make a long story short, I found out that I did not have a hosts file in the windows directory on my pc. Explorer showed that I had a hosts file, but it was actually hosts.txt. Windows 95 kept renaming it for me and Explorer did not show the file extension because of a view option that was set by default in Explorer ( hide MSDOS file extensions for file types that are registered ). At any rate, I kept thinking all that time that I had a valid hosts file when I did not. My beef is, why can't Informix have a more accurate error message? The problem wasn't that Informix could not connect to the host, the problem was that Informix could not find an entry in my hosts file ( indeed couldn't even find my hosts file). A simple "-999: cannot locate hosts file in \\windows" would have put me on the right track immediately. On the other hand, maybe the problem is between the keyboard and the chair! Mike Ballentine