Connects/Disconnects BDE problem

Hi folks,

My program uses a lot of tables (63). When i start the program it opens a table, read the contents it needs, closes the table. This for each table. I've got a 16 bit and a 32 bit version of the program.The problem is that the 16bit version takes about 10 min. to load and the 32bit only 10 sec. I connect to the database (db2,oracle,etc) via odbc. When i look at the odbc trace, i see that there are a lot of connects and disconnects in the odbc statements when i use the 16 bit version and this doesn't happen  when i use 32 bit version. Session and database keepconnected are set on true. I think that there is a problem with the BDE.The 16 bit version uses BDE 2.5 and the 32 bit version uses BDE 3.0 or 3.5.
How can i make the 16 bit version faster?

Thanks in advance,