Hi, A number of applications I have known will allow you to specify a password in plaintext in a startup file. After the first start, the password is encrypted, and will be used on subsequent starts, so you don't need an admin there to supply a password. I need to be able to do the same trick. A couple of hours of googling would suggest that it's done by PBE (password based encryption) but I can't seem to find a code example Java for preference). If anyone has any idea, or could point me to an example, that would be great. Cheers, Ewan