My boss uses Access 97, and has a fairly complex application used by multiple users on a Novell server. Each user has his own copy of Access 97, and are not likely to try something other than using the menus provided. The two users who are more sophisticated often (for years now) take a copy home in their "briefcase", synchronizing it back when they go back on the net.
Today, my boss noticed that the tables are somehow marked as "replicas". They have an unusual symbol next to their names, and now he's having trouble getting some of the queries to execute properly. He can't get the error message, it flashes too fast.
How could a database become a "replica" inadvertently? What can he do, short of restoring backups and losing data?