Dim compactonclose As Variant
    compactonclose = Application.GetOption("Auto Compact")
    If compactonclose Then
        MsgBox "I am set to compact on close"
  End If

The above routine will detect if compact on close is selected. As for detecting when the database has actually closed, still working on that. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ll see what can be done. My guess would be to try to detect whether the database is set to compact on close and find a way to detect when access has completed the compacting process.

Thanks, Lu

The test database for restarting the application is now available in Access2007 and Access2000 versions.
If someone could test the MDB version and let me know if it works properly or not I’d be grateful.

A few comments:

1) I realise you work with Access 2007 (with new extensions) - all previous versions use .mdb for the DB itself and .ldb for the lockfile - by adding the ‘l’ in line 3, it doesn’t work for older versions (it should replace the ‘m’) - any idea how to make it generic?

1a) Say you run a DB in execute-modus (extension = .accde) - then looking for the ‘l’+'accde’-file is not going to work, as the lockfile will still be ‘.laccdb’ - right?

2) When Access crashes, it doesn’t delete the lockfile - in case you run this batchfile and the .ldb not being removed, you end up in an infinite loop - not a resource-hog, I assume, but on creating this batchfile again (on restarting Access), you might run into trouble, as the previous batchfile is still present and you can’t create a new batchfile with the same name. Perhaps you should build in some timer that self-deletes the batch file (after 2 minutes). And give batchfiles an unique name (e.g. incl. a timestamp).

Regarding the lock file, I assume that its deletion by Access is the last action performed once a database is closed, which would make sense since it’s the whole purpose of a lock file.
I do not attempt to delete the lock file, Access does that; the last sentence of the batch file, the DEL %0 actually deletes the batch file itself to keep things clean.

Thank you again for dropping by.

A couple of months back I tackled the issue of forcing a restart by calling a VB6 EXE on an Access UNLOAD event and passing the database file path as a command-line parameter. Now I can see your self-contained BAT file approach is better. I used WAIT to delay the restart, and then trapped the Unable to Unlock File error in a resume loop until Access unlocked the MDB file and deleted the LDB file. I was wondering why in your code, you try deleting the LDB file outside Access? Is there not a risk of corruption as the previous instance of Access would still exist until after its deletion of the LDB file?