Thanks for your reply Jorge:

I think perhaps I miscommunicated... I do establish a connection with
connector.net. The connection works fine without pooling. I use the same
connection object in all my forms by sharing the single connection as a public
variable of the application's main class/window. This connection object works
very well as long as the user is actually using it. The single connection is
quite happilly being used for everything done in the application.

I think .net rather than MySql may be closing the connection object when the
connection is idle for some time (say 15 minutes).

I had a look at the connection object properties using the debugger, and there
is a READ-ONLY run-time integer property called myConnection.ConnectionTimeout
which is set at 15

I assume this means 15 minutes. Interestingly, 15 minutes is more or less the
time that the connection stays alive when the app is idle.

Does anyone know if there is a way to set this connection timeout higher (say to
the 8 hours that mySQL is documented to give as timeout of MySQL server
connection)?

I found a property variable MyConnection.InitializeLifetimeService which may
have something to do with this -- but I don't know how to use it to change the
ConnectionTimeout away from the default value of 15.

Thanks anyone who has solved this.

Have a great day!