Andrew,
Thanks, that makes sense and confirms my interpretation. The verisign.so driver was written by Janine Sisk and was based on the Cybercash interface written by Brad Duell . It is an included package in OpenACS 4.5 and OpenACS 4.6.
I am still using AOLServer ad33.13 primarily because I use nsvhr which Jerry Asher patched for ad33.13, so the AOLServer 4.0 stuff is not an option at present.
Hopefully, once I have established that the assumptions listed above are correct (or been put straight) I may be in a position to make a stab at writing a new implementation.
Regards
Richard