In Office 97, the default connection method was DDE, which opened Access and
got it to open the required database. In that case, the user would be
presented with Access's login/password dialog box and all would be well.

In Office 2003 the default connection method is OLEDB and (here, at any
rate) a completely different dialog - the OLEDB datalink dialog box - pops
up. The trouble is that getting through this dialog is difficult and tedious
because you have to
a. enter the correct user name
b. uncheck the "blank password" box
c. enter the password
d. check the "Allow saving password" box
e. Go to the "all" tab and enter the full pathname of the security database
f. click OK
g. select the query/table (if there is more than one in the database), at
which point the data link dialog box pops up again and you have to...
h. ...go through a->f again.

Hardly likely to work in most cases, I think. What's more, if the user
closes and reopens the mail merge main document, they face all these
questions again because (as far as I can tell) Word does not actually "save
the password" as the dialog box suggests. Which is probably the correct
thing for Word to do from a security perspective, but unfortunately, this
time through, you just see an error message.

You can, however, revert to the Word 97 way of doing things (to a certain
extent, anyway) by checking Word Tools|Options|general|"Confirm conversions
at open", going through the connection dialog again and choosing the DDE
option when it is offered.

One trick with OLEDB connections to Access is to click the "New Data Source"
button in "Select Data Source" when you first set up the data source, then
choose the Jet OLEDB provider and fill in all the necessary pathnames and
security info (as above in a-e, plus the database pathname). If you don't
save the password, you should be presented with the data link dialog box
when Word tries to open the database, but this time all the pathnames and
username should be filled in and te user should "only" have to do b,c and d.
But then things may get complicated again later - I forget. After you have
created one such .odc file, the user should open the .odc, not the .mdb,
when attaching a data source in a new mail merge main document. (It is also
possible to use a .udl file, or make the connection in VBA, but let's not go
there right now).

Peter Jamieson