Access is a canary in a coal mine for network data loss, and
if the developer is blaming the network, you need to spend
a lot of time checking everything. Like is it one client computer
in particular? Is someone kicking the power cord out? Do you
have a faulty patch cable or switch? Does turning off file caching
and optimistic locking solve the problem? Remember, you can't
depend on the users to tell you even that their computer is rebooting
every 15 minutes or half hour.

Having said that, the number one cause of data loss is user
error. Normally, they don't realise they are causing the problem.

The users don't like to hear that either. Sometimes they are
belligerent and wilfully ignorant when you try to identify
the problem. And that is the developers problem, not yours.

Still, do what you can to help: try to exclude network problems
from the range of possibilities.

(david)

Of course.

No other messages?  Such as "Disk or Network Error"?    Does data
still appear for other tables?  Only some records missing but other
records still there?   When you do the refresh all records then
magically show up?   How about if they exit the FE and then enter the
FE?

Something strange is going on but without additional error messages
I'm not sure they are your fault.

Tony

Hi Tony,

I've been doing some checking on the 'so called' expert access
programmer that the company employed for this database.

I've found in the linked table manager that the mapping of the links
is both by mapped drive and by UMC mapping ( \\servername\directory\)

From what i've read in the newsgroups and in a few books i've found is
that the mapping has to be one or the other and preferably using
the computer name\directory.

as to error messages, I'm having the users watch for error messages
and making screen prints of the messages so I will have some kind of
a record to trouble shoot this problem.

When data is missing, all the data is missing, ie; if a telephone
number is missing from one record, it's missing from all the records
using a telepone number.

The programmer started having everyone to a database repair before
using the database, then she started telling everyone to do the linked
table manager refresh just lately.   This does bring the 'missing'
data back, but it takes time to rebuild the links and people are
complaining..

I've written a few databases in DOS and windows using first foxbase
and later fox for windows for a parts department.  I was a new car
dealer from 1964 to 2000 and about 1983 Chrysler didn't have anything
to do a computer database so I was on 5x8 cards.  I figured I could
beat this and taught myself Dbase III and started programming.  When
we sold the business in 2000 the same computer based database was
still being used with 105k records with sales and order histories,
supercedence, notes, sales etc and it was running on a  500 mb hard
drive in multiuser mode.  I never had the problems i've seen with the
access database even through I was using up to 15 different indexes.

I'll check some more tomorrow when no one is using the database and
see what I can find out.

I'm pretty sure most of the problem is the linked table manager using
both mapped drives and \\computername\directory linking.  But I want
to be sure before I write a report to the owner about what I've forund
'wrong' with the network   One thing I know for sure is that the
network is fast, I can see <1ms times between computers and 75-85mb
through-put between machines.

The machine that the 'BE' of the database is running on is a 2.8ghz P4
with 2gb of memory.  This machine as a mirror raid hard drive setup
using 2@ WD 7200 rpm drives.  The computers are tied together using a
16 port 10/100 ethernet switch with the longest cat5 cable being about
50' long.  I ran a cert check on the network and everything passed
with flying colors so the hardware appears to be solid.

I'll get the checking down tomorrow and post the info tomorrow nite,

Thanks for the reply

Bob Smith
Robert Smith Consulting