I don't know how Apache works in Windows but are you sure you have a user called daemon in Windows? What I am talking about is your Windows username - the person you login as. If you login as user fred and create a USER DSN then only user fred sees that DSN. That means a process (like Apache) running as user daemon only sees USER DSNs created by daemon and cannot see USER DSNs created by fred. For this reason DSNs you want accessible by multiple people are created as SYSTEM DSNs.