Microsoft Access ADP Problem in Office 2007

Recently, I upgraded my workstation to a newer machine with Windows Vista and picked up the latest version of Office 2007 to go with it.

I'll post another day concerning Vista in more detail but for today I just want to pass on my experience with our Access ADP project created in Office 2003 and now being opened by several clients in Office 2007.

We use our ADP project for various back-end administrative purposes for which web development (which is always more time consuming) is not warranted. Since we have no Windows forms programmers on staff, we rely on Access because we DO have a key staff-member who can develop in Access. This frees up more of my time so I can concentrate on our Inter/Intra-Net development using ASP.Net.

At any rate, opening the ADP project created in Office 2003 in Office 2007 yielded, shall we say, less than desirable results. Navigation through the forms was very, very slow, and I found all sort of alarmist posts on UseNet from people claiming "The Sky Is Falling" and denouncing the new Access 2007 version as buggy beta material.

I found a Microsoft hot-fix offered to resolve the problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936519

In order to obtain the hot-fix, I needed to call them directly. Of course the 1st level phone staff tried to get me to pay for the support, but I insisted it was a hot fix issue offered for free and then they transferred me.

Resolution
I installed the hot-fix but it did not seem to resolve all my issues. The app still ran very slowly, to the point of being unusable. The final fix was pretty easy. I would have been reluctant to attempt it without MS holding my hand, but it was actually a very simple procedure and I shouldn't have hesitated.

I created a NEW Access ADP in 2007 and then chose from the External Data, import and selected the old Access ADP project. I navigated through all the windows for Forms, Macros, etc. Tables and Queries are not applicable in this environment so they did not need to be selected. I imported all, a process that took about 5 or 10 minutes for this project.

Then I save the new file as an Access ADP 2003 compatible project, and voila, it WORKS!

The only other issue I had was that several button event handlers were using subs to handle events and for some reason, the new version of outlook did not like that. I converted the subs to functions and BLAM, I had a working version of the project which could be opened in both Access 2003 and Access 2007.

An associate was experiencing some crashes with the new file until she updated her system.

Also, since we have a routine that extracts image files out of SQL to display in reports, they are saved as temp files on the hard drive. Despite the fact that the project is stored in a trusted location and I have Admin permissions, in order to allow the ADP to write files to my drive I had to turn UAC off (gasp)! I could not afford any more research time to get it working otherwise so if anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear from you...

I hope this helps dispel some of the rumors and frustrations surrounding Access ADP functionality under Vista and Office 2007.