If you were so inclined, you could use the VB6 Winsock control to connect to the host box (assuming the SQL Server is set up to communicate via TCP/IP) on port 1433, IIRC. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbcon98/html/vbconusingwinsockcontrol.asp for how to use the Winsock control. Doing something like this would allow you to tell if both server and SQL Server services were up, without having to query any databases just to get status.