Mike,

>It was discovered,since this is a WAN setup that someone else from the "outside" was going in and opening tables exclusively, in the process giving errors of "file access denied" to the other users.

A stop gap measure. Write a little app that runs on the server that simply opens all the tables in shared mode and leaves them open. Then the bozo that was opening the tables exclusive will get the error thrown back at them instead of all the other users. *L*