Excellent post, you're confirming a lot of my suspicions. I've been leaning the Solaris route but have been cautious, as this is a totally new world for me (though we do have at least one person here who knows it really well).

You should probably be asking "how can I reproduce the functionality of the desktop app" rather than trying to make the look-and-feel the same.

True, and I know that deep down. It’s just that I recently overhauled the program to look and feel more user friendly and our users have been VERY responsive (you can’t imagine the good-guy emails I’ve been getting simply for adding coherent menus and cute icons). I suppose I just like the attention.

You haven't really spoken to the complexity of the application. Is it just a reporting tool, or does it do much more than just getting data from the database and displaying it?

It’s slightly more than a reporting tool. I can’t go into specifics (security is a big thing here), but basically it allows the user to input data (simple, single line records), pull information from those records, and print out a dozen or so reports. One of these reports is used to update information on a different system that currently is not on the web. If my application gets moved to the web, one of its new tasks will be to update this other system directly instead of using a paper trail to do it. Eventually this second application will return data to my application so the user can view the results of the transaction. As I said before, right now the only connection between my desktop app and the second app is a report that is printed out.