I have been having this problem for a number of months - ever since we upgraded some of our laptops to Windows 7 and upgraded to Office 2010 as a result. It IS extremely frustrating, especially as there seems to be no answer!
Our setup uses a shared database back-end over a simple network of around 8 PCs, (wired and wireless). I guess our problem is compounded by having the shared back-end stored on a Linux server - however, this was all fine when we had Windows XP! The problem
was quickly identified to be whenever you access the network for something else, e.g. we have shared documents too, Word and Publisher files etc., the Access database link was broken - guaranteed. If you were lucky there was a window of opportunity which could
be exploited if you opened and closed the other file quickly enough you could return to the database without the link being broken. Things seemed to have gotten worse recently, hence my post as a result of increased frustration. We always had the same problem
and seemingly "random" occasions also, but I had always suspected (and still do) that these are other activities with the network (that I neither know about or understand) that are affecting the link. Especially any period of inactivity was likely to result
in this error. Now, however, it can happen every 5 minutes.
I looked at upsizing to the Express version of SQL but it's just not as easy as Access to get the things done that we want to do, that's the beauty of Access I suppose. It's frustrating because it worked beautifully and now it doesn't. It's more tempting
(and MUCH cheaper) to go back to XP than to upsize to SQL, but this seems silly. Windows 8 didn't make any improvement either. I'm yet to try Office 2013 or Windows 8.1 but I haven't heard that either of these is a miracle cure.
I'm getting desperate. I believe nobody makes a database better than Access for what we need which puts me in control of the database, but I have looked at what the competition can do and Microsoft will lose my custom if they're not careful and once I'm
not using Access I won't need Windows either!