Has anyone seen this behaviour before?

A customer reports that (suddenly) the compacted BE is marked as a "Protected OS" file and the application cannot find it unless the folder view is changed to "Do not hide protected OS Files". The BE is not just hidden - the folder was already set to show Hidden files. The customer machine is XP Pro. The BE is A2003 format (mdb). He has been running the application for about a year.

(By design) when our application closes, the Access 2010 Frontend (FE):
- copies the backend (BE) to a temporary file
- deletes the original BE
- compacts the temporary BE into another file
- renames the compacted file to the original filename

This has worked flawlessly for about five years. Needless to say, it caused consternation as the customer thought he had lost all his his data.

Any assistance would be appreciated.



Update

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A virus is known to cause this behaviour (Win32/Hider.NAB Trojan). I don't know if it is the cause at our customer's site.

The DOS command ATTRIB has a "/s" switch that is supposed to set/clear a "system" attribute for files or folders. It does not reproduce the problem though.

(Issue is still unresolved).


Update 2.

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The BE can be converted to "non-protected OS" by:
* ATTRIB -s -h <filename>
* move to a different folder, then move it back

(Issuse is closed).