I have several documents in Word 2010 that contain merge fields from access. Usually, when I try yto use these documenst I have no problems, irrespective of which applications I have open. Sometimes, however, if I have both Word and Access open at the same time I get the message "Error has occurred: The database has been placed in a state by user 'Admin' on machine 'xxxxxxxxx' that prevents it from being opened or locked.", and I am unable to complete the merge. This can happen either when I try to run the associated query in Access, or when I try to open the merge document in Word. The problem also seems to be independent of whether either or both files were created in Office 2010, or a previous version. Can anyone solve this please