Well the good news - your words - is that you are wrong, Gerald. But I don't think that's good, really. I tried the same update in Access in exclusive mode and it worked fine and quickly. I was stunned by how quickly. I'm running it again in shared mode, and it's gone off into orbit as it often does leaving me no clue as to what it is doing or if it is doing anything at all. But eventually I expect to get the same lock error.

When it has run off like this in the past I have had to break out of it with ctrl-alt-delete, which may be one reason why I'm having trouble now. But I when I let it run, it continues to late into the night when it is finally broken off at the server.

Is this peculiar to NT and/or Access? Are these two phenomena (ie., lock errors and lost in space) related?