MDAC, Collation and UAC

I have been struggling on and off with EasyFrom DBConvert converting a Paradox 4 database to MySQL.  I would get this error intermittently:

[800A0CB3] Object or provider is not capable of performing requested operation.

The weird thing is I'll work just fine the one day, then the next I get that error.  So I finally tracked it down - two main causes.  The first is the Collation scheme - my paradox files uses International scheme, for some reason sometimes my system default gets reset to ASCII.

The other cause - and this one really got me - was UAC on Vista.  I used to run my system with it turned off.  However I recently enabled it after some software suggested it works better with it enabled.  So if you enable UAC you get that error.  The fix is to either turn off UAC or to configure a ODBC DSN and make sure to set the network directory and username properly, to a location where you have write access and where Vista's hidden redirect-on-write process will not cause trouble.