Aaron,

<< Even though I mentioned, "encryption password" straight up? >>

The encryption password is used in a lot of different places.  It's *always*
used for the configuration file, and also used for encrypted tables,
encrypted connections to the server, etc.  As I said, by default, the
database catalog is never encrypted unless you specifically turn this on,
and you never mentioned this fact.

<< I left the message should others get the error - which is incredibly
misleading. >>

When the database catalog is encrypted, the whole thing is encrypted.
Therefore, EDB is not able to tell whether the issue is that the character
set is wrong, or that the encryption password was not specified properly, so
it just reports the first problem that it sees.  This is as it should be -
even EDB shouldn't be able to find out any information about a catalog
unless it has the correct encryption key.

If you have any other questions, please let me know.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com