MS Access 2010 FE/BE shared network, locking itself

Hi

Having worked with MS Access for ages, I know its not the most stable, or best product to use, however, you use what the company gives you.

I have a Front End in Access (queries, linked tables, lots and lots of code).

Back end data in mdb files (lots of those).

Now, this week I've encountered a weird problem. There is occassional (daily but not a set time) error message popping up about losing a connection to the server. F5 seems to resolve and carry on running. Later on all users in one particular database (around 10 or so users) get database locked message.

I have a ping going in the cmd window to see network speeds, to try and prove to the company it people they need to look into it as it's stopping users and they are muttering things whilst looking at me and they can't work. Its bouncing up and down between 1ms and 35ms... To me seems ok.

I've used DAO to open a recordset on the linked table, Front end is copied to local drive before running. The DAO in the code is stopping on rst.edit or rst.addnew and erroring 3027 - locked database.

At this point I need to get all the users to close the front end, and the error goes away - for a while. Not the best solution though.
So I am trying to think of things I can do to see if its my code (not had problems before) network, combination of both, or perhaps a patch ms released that messed with 2010 in a bid to get people to upgrade to 2013... I hope not, I tried it and I'd need to redo all the code...

The Front End is compacted and repaired before release to the shared drive, which is then copied to the users local drive.
The mdb in question has been compacted too.

So my questions are :
- has anyone come across this ?
- if so, how did you get around it ? Or did you just put up with it?

Regards

Vince