[AccessD] Access 2002/2003 Very strange behavior

x-posted to Access-D and Access-L

Post hurricane Sandy I have a group of users now running on Virtual Machines, and a smaller group who are operating remotely on their Blade computers that they have had for some years. A small sub-set of these users are having trouble opening applications they have been using for years. These are Access 2002/2003 applications, split into the usual Front End/Back End configuration.

Most users are working fine, but there are some who get the message "This database is in an unrecognized format." when they try to launch the front end MDE file, and one user gets "The expression you entered has a function name that [App Name] can't find."

One application is set up so each user has their own copy of the front end, and with another app. the (small) user group shares a single front end.

I have found that for the first application, where users have their own copy, I was able to get them going by giving them a copy of the MDB file which the MDE is created from. They now see neither of those two messages. I have decompiled and rebuilt the MDE file, but still those two users cannot open it. (Little piece of detail, those two users happen to be remotely using a Blade computer, not a virtual machine.

So they can run the MDB, but not the MDE. What's up with that?

Then there is one user of the shared application who gets the "This database is in an unrecognized format." message, and yet all the other users have no trouble opening it. With that user if I get them to open the MDB version of the front end they simply get an hour glass for a longish time, and then Access comes back and says it has detected a corruption in the file, and the MDB is toast. All of this when nobody else is using the application.

Does anyone have any brilliant ideas? Why would an MDB file work for some users and the corresponding MDE not? What might be causing the corruption of the other MDB file?

Been struggling with this for the past two days! Any suggestions would be appreciated.



Lambert