I've had similar more ominous problems recently with an Access XP back end
running under Access2003 on a Vista machine. When the compact and repair was
run on the be, ALL DATA Entered since the be was loaded on that machine was
deleted. All that was left in the be was data that had been entered on an XP
machine prior to the be being moved to the new machine.
Even worse, evidently Vista blocked the normal back-up and rename that
occurs with compact/repair and came back with a cryptic message about
creating a database called "db1.mdb". The only way I was finally able to
locate this db was to duplicate the action, and notice that it then created
"db2.mdb", followed by "db3.mdb" but no amount of searching was able to
locate it (Vista does not "search" worth a s..t). I finally found it in a 6
layer deep folder under the users name under the application data folder and
there all 4 "backups" were found, non of which showed up when I searched for
*.mdb .
I have talked to many companies who are advising against buying new machines
with Vista installed, and at this point I heartily agree. Its behavior is
flakier than a three dollar bill.
I'm guessing that to run a compact and repair you have to run it as
administrator, but that still doesn't explain why all the new records (any
added while under Vista) were deleted, representing in this case over a
month's worth of entry. My customer was in tears and I spent 4 hours trying
to find the lost backup file. I'd say Vista has some serious compatibility
issues. I couldn't even retrieve the be file she had attached to an e-mail to
send me to evaluate because Outlook blocked it and refused to unblock it from
the Sent Message file.
