Give a try to Mode=Read (as you can read from http://www.vb-helper.com/howto_ado_read_only_db.html)

>Our office used to try to share an Access 97 database on a folder where many people only had Read or Add&Read permissions. Some users would get the error that said "database is opened exclusively by another user". It didn't seem very consistent. This is what I think was happening:
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>A user with read permission would open the database. He would be unable to create the .ldb locking file. Access would say "database is readonly" and would open. That's what you expect. Same thing if the .mdb is on a CD-R.
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>A user with change permission would open the database, creating the .ldb file. A second person with read permission would try to open the same database. The .ldb file is already there, but the second user can't edit the .ldb file to add his machine name (or whatever it is). Rather than doing the sensible thing and opening it readonly for him, it thinks the first user has opened it exclusively and gives the second user the bogus message.
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>My questions:
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>1) Am I describing the problem accurately or is something else going on?
>2) Is it documented anywhere? I couldn't find anything in the help or the KB. Is there something official that I can show to skeptical sysadmins who control the permissions?
>3) Is it any different in Access 2002?
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>Not everyone wants or needs the finer control available with Access user level security. I hoped to avoid the problem with a certain database.