ahhhh, is that what those little files are for. Its been quite a while since i've used Access (thankfully).

At a place i was once working, we had about 1Tb of data, and some smart people thought they would use Access as their GUI to it. Unfort what they didnt know, if they didnt use pass thru' queries, Access would bring down whole chunks of the data for processing on the local machine. ( Access 97 from memory ).

Needless to say, the local lan ground to a halt, and queries never finished. The end users were quite unhappy about it and wanted us to change the way Access worked! The the concept of pass thru' queries was too complicated for them. ie they had to code 'raw' sql, rather than use a GUI. Marketers, ROFL.