I thought the benefit of using MySQL was to have a non-ODBC database that would be faster/more robust than ODBC-dependent solutions, such as MS Access? and why would your own server software be written in such a way as to depend on ODBC?

I installed the ODBC driver. I check in the Settings|Control Panel|Administrative tools|Services that the MySQL server service is started. And I get the the following error message when I type at the dos
command prompt:

c:\mysql\bin>mysqladmin create TDM mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed error: 'Can't connect to MySQL server on 'localhost' (10061)' Check that mysqld is running on localhost and that the port is 3306. You can check this by doing 'telnet localhost 3306'

I can see in Task Manager that mysqld-nt is indeed running.

What should I do next?

Thanks again!!!