Thanks for all your answers.
I'm still looking for the combination of Oracle, Solaris and free. :-) Oracle because the database is.
Solaris because thats out platform and I cant port to Windows because the Expect.pm hasn't been released for Windows.
Free - because it would be good if it was.
I did think about writing a server process that a windows client could connect to to trigger the expect part of the app that ran on unix. But I do try and stop myself making things too complex - sometimes. Simon