Please help. I'm stumped. One of

[Katerine]

Please help. I'm stumped.
One of our clients is having the following trouble with one of the databases we're helping them with.

In this example, Person A is the creator of the database. She frequently, but not in this example, goes into design view. She's running Access 2000 SR-1 on Windows XP Home Edition.
Person B is.. another user. As far as I know, he never goes into design view. He's running Access 2000 on Windows 2000 Professional Edition. I installed SR-1a on his machine today; it did not fix the problem.

Both users open the database, by default, as Shared, no locks.

The front-end database is located on a shared network drive. This is a multiuser database, with some local tables (including the Switchboard table), but the vast majority of the tables are located on a remote SQL server which is accessed through the internet.

The database opens with the Switchboard, which operates off the local Switchboard table.

Ok. So..
Person A opens the database. The switchboard opens. She goes into the "Groups" form, which is a large bound form with several subforms. And that's it; that's all she does. She does not go into design view this time (that is, she does sometimes, but not this time).

At this point, Person B tries to open the database, but can't; instead, upon opening, gets the error message:

3734: The database has been placed in a state by user &quot;ADMIN&quot; on machine &quot;<machine name>&quot; that prevents it from being opened or locked.

If Person A closes the database, then Person B can enter.

If Person B enters the database and goes into the &quot;Groups&quot; form, Person A can still enter the database; she does not get the same error message.

I found some knowledgebase articles which suggested there were some bugs fixed in SR-1, but that didn't fix the problem. I also looked in here, but didn't find much that seemed to apply. I did find a suggestion to establish a central MDW file, but since I seem to have a peculiar mental block that allows me to understand complicated code but prevents me from understanding workgroup files (), I'd prefer not to go into that unless I'm certain that it will fix the problem. Katie

 

[mikey69]

The fact that your error msg refers to user&quot;Admin&quot; suggests that the problem is caused by someone having set workgroup security. agree with you that it's a tricky subject, full of minute detail, but think you may have to persevere. Have you read what is in the book &quot;Building Applications with MS Access? Think it is included in electronic form on the Office 2000 CD. The 97 version is definitely on the Office 97 CD, and that would give you the general rules.

Good luck

 

[Katerine]

PS - my apologies for the bad subject header. I had intended to give it a different header, but the server froze midway and I had to copy and paste the message text.. and I forgot about the subject line. Katie

 

[flaviooooo]

Hi,

I know we're almost 1 year later, but has this issue been resolved?
We have the same problem here, and I can't figure it out...

Greetz

 

[MichaelRed]

wheather or not ... mikey69 is at least on track.

Ms. A. Security is (to put it mildly) convolouted. A common cause of the problem described is to have the seperate users refering to different .MDW files.

Another 'problem' in the situation described is the single copy / location of the FE. It really SHOULD be installed on local machines.




MichaelRed
m.red@att.net

Searching for employment in all the wrong places

 

[mikey69]

In the year that has passed I've of necessity had a fair bit more experience in server environments and they definitely add another degree of complexity. You should definitely look to your network admninstrator to help you solve the problems, by checking permissions, user groups ans so on.

By the way, I agree strongly with Michael Red about local front ends. The single front end is likely to be another ingredient in the stew of denial of access.

Access makes all things possible. It even makes them intelligible

 

[godfrey62]

Another thing we found was that users were going to the SAVE option, thinking they had to save their data. We explained how Access works, and showed an example, and cleared that problem (one of many) at least.

 

[mikey69]

Godfrey62 - Glad you got sorted out. In your last post is another most important point. You have to educate users about Access, because it is so different from the Excel/Word environment that they'll be used to. One aspect that they need to understand is that all the front ends are connected to live data in the back end. Whilst you have probably designed the front end to restrict what they can get up to, it's quite likely that you haven't activated Access's security set-up. As I said before it's very cumbersome, but it is really the only practical way to protect individual fields in specific tables from th risk of an enthusiastic user crerating &quot;a quick little query&quot; and inadvertently deleting vast chunks of precious data.

Access makes all things possible. It even makes them intelligible