Too many times when I am asked to look at old ADO code, the recordsets are created with a slower cursor than they actually need. This especially prevalent in ASP code. In most every piece of ASP code, the job of the page is to report existing data. In that case you should always us a adOpenForwardOnly cursor. Remember, if you are only reading the data, the other cursor types are using extra database resources and will cause extra round trips to the database. If you are using other cursors just to enable being able to go backwards in the recordset, it is almost always better to use the adOpenForwardOnly cursor and cache the data locally to allow for reverse transversal.
Am I the only that abhors this dreadful API? I understand the usefulness of using Parameters.Refresh() during development. The problem lies in the fact that is it just too easy to leave the code in place. Including an extra network round-trip in every call to this call is simply a waste of time. Now I know that you are an intelligent programmer that never wouldn never leave that code in place, I am talking about all the other programmers that would. Most databases (ignoring Access) allows you to query the database for the information about parameters. Since the database supports, why does ADO have to? I don't think it does.