Microsoft Access 2007 - it's still lousy

I'm back using Access 2007 a year after I wrote about Microsoft Access 2007 reliability issues and suggested workarounds.

In the interim I've been using Access 2003 again.

There are some good things about 2003 (ok, just Sharepoint support), but, by and large, it's busted. It's broken in deep and inexplicable ways. Heaven be your friend if you should change a column name -- you may get weird and persistent side-effects.

Since nobody can imagine Microsoft going away, this kind of thing is more than a bit depressing. It's like spending an eternity in Limbo ...

Update 10/22/09: A bit more detail on the two latest bugs, now that I've figured them out.

I was getting a common and useless error message: The setting you entered isn't valid for this property every time I ran a query on a link to a Sharepoint List who's schema had changed since I'd created the link. In particular a field had gone from memo to string. I had to delete the link and create new one. Access 2007 is supposed to be able to regenerate its link on command, but it turns out that doesn't work.

The other bug I got was related to creating an alias to a Sharepoint List column name where the alias happened to be identical to another Sharepoint Column name that wasn't part of the query. Turns out it sort of works, but not really.
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