Hi Eric,
Kind of funny, I had not seen your posting before sending mine and we seem to live a very similar situation.
Is this application used with a runtime engine?
If yes, are the .ESL/.ESO files set to READ ONLY?
A long time ago I had an application having a very strange behaviour and it took me quite a while to find that it was only because of these two files not set to read only. This behavious only occurs in a multiuser environment.
I hope this will help.
Have a nice day.