Pat, to your comment "I suspect there is a way of viewing an .mdb as a text file to determine what its version is." I opened an old .MDB file with Notepad but the problem is that there is nothing in there that looks like version numbering of the form 16.2201.etc.
On the other hand, if you want to look for this: "M i c r o S o f t" (I was using Notepad) you might find that it is part of a library reference that includes more text with spaces between each letter, which could be UNICODE. "M i c r o S o f t \ M i c r o S o f t O f f i c e 1 0 " - which would give you the major version number because MS builds the folders with that major number in it. Don't know whether the format stays consistent as you go back farther and farther in older versions. Sorry to say that I don't have an A97 DB to experiment on. But the section I was in looked like the References list with possibly UNICODE encoding. And the reference list IS stored as file paths so that kind of folder structure might be there.
It's not much - but it's a start. Of course, we have to be careful about reverse engineering DBs. Violates the EULA if we take it far enough to learn some of the juicier secrets.
