Do some research on DSN less ODBC. You can create the connection  in VBA
even though the connection is not in Admin. You will need to make sure the
user has a valid userid and pwd to the system or it will fail. You could
hard code  yours or a generic User and PWD but it's not secure. Some of the
code on these links shows you how to embed user/pwd, I prefer not to. I
know for a fact if you omit user/pwd on the AS400 string, it will prompt for
both.



Link to Google Search
search.yahoo.com/search?fr=sbc-web&tab=&p=ODBC+dsn+less



This
<www.carlprothman.net/Default.aspx
IBM> site shows how to create one with many different data sources. I use
AS400 & MSAccess frequently.