I understand you didn't have a trial version. However, the Office 2003
programs will "time out" after 15 days if you don't "activate" them,
essentially giving you a 15 day trial period. Open Access and go to
Help|Activate Product. It will either come back with a dialog box that says
you've already activated or it will walk you through the activation process.
The process can be done over the Internet if you have an Internet connection
or you can phone Microsoft. The phone number will be given in the walk
through. If you already had Office installed, Access may have seen this
install date and taken its 15 days from that instead of from the install
date of Access itself and so went immediately into read only mode.
Also, for trouble shooting purposes, as Terry asked, can you create a new,
blank database file? If the above is the problem, then you probably can't.