400,

Are you sure you don't have an old version of the driver lying around in
the classpath (MySQL-4.1 sends some different metadata that would
confuse an old 3.0 or 2.0.14 version of the driver)...What does
Connection.getMetaData().getDriverVersion() return?

I just tested this with 3.1.6 and 4.1.9 with the following little
program and got this output:

Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://:3308/test");
        Statement stmt = conn.createStatement();
        ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery("SHOW TABLE STATUS");
       
        while (rs.next()) {
            System.out.println(rs.getString("name") + "-> " +
rs.getString("engine"));
        }

**** OUTPUT ****

CUSTOMER-> InnoDB
DATETEST-> MyISAM
PAIR-> InnoDB
TRAVERSAL-> MyISAM
Test-> MyISAM
Test2-> InnoDB
UPDATABLE-> MyISAM
[snip]

    -Mark