Moving back end of a Microsoft Access multi-user application

This isn’t really Dynamics GP related and I’ll probably never have to do this again, but it had me stumped for a while, so I wanted to document it.

A customer purchased a new server, and we moved the SQL databases for GP and and all of the file shares over to the new server – that part worked just fine. However, after leaving the customer site I got a call about a critical Access application that wasn’t working correctly.  It was a multi-user application, where the designer had a front-end mdb file on each machine, with a back-end mdb file on the network share.  We had moved all of the files to the new server with the share name being the same, the users were mapping the same drive letter and the path was exactly the same.  I double- and triple-checked the permissions on the files, even loosening them up quite a bit, but still had no luck.  Finally it occurred to me to hold the Shift key down while opening the front-end file so that I could see the database window and get a look at how the tables were linked.  On a hunch I used the Linked Table Manager to re-link all of the tables to the back end database, even though the path to the file was correct.  After re-linking the tables everything worked like a charm.  Apparently Access saves the server info somewhere with the link information, which I’d seen before with linked SQL tables, though I’m not sure why when it was just using a file path to access the database and not a connection string, as with the SQL tables.