I see what you're saying but upgrading an OSS library is usually undertaken by somebody that thinks beforehand "I wonder if upgrading this will have any implica

I see what you're saying but upgrading an OSS library is usually undertaken by somebody that thinks beforehand "I wonder if upgrading this will have any implications" whereas clicking "Express" on update.windows.com is billed as pain free, just like all things point and click. Plus I had followed the advice in MSDN concerning connection pooling which was a registry setting for ODBC NOT part of the framework I was using (VBscript in ASP). Responsibilty for pooling was pushed into the framework. The goodbye python article was about assumptions one could make about what would be available before one's code arrived. I bet php3 code still runs just fine.