[Peter Jamieson]

I don't know the answer (once set up, ODBC connections seem pretty stable)
but...
a. what is the data source?
b. is the data source on another system (i.e. on a remote machine on a
network) ?
c. ODBC connections to "file" type data sources such as delimited text
files, Excel files etc. are likely to fail if the file is "in use" by
something else and is not designed for multi-user operation - for example,
you can probably work with an Access .mdb on your machine, and successfully
use it as an ODBC data source in Word but if your data source is an Excel
file and it's open in Excel, Word will probably fail to open it.

Peter Jamieson

"frank" wrote in message
.com...
Hello.

I have a document that is attached to an ODBC data source. Almost all the
time when the document is opened the attachment to the datasource exists.
Once in a while the attachment to the datasource is broken and I get the
message that it's a mailmerge document and word can't find the datasource.
I'll close the document then re-open it and the link will be fine. Can
anybody tell me why this would be happening? I'm on Windows 2000 SP4 and
Office XP SP3, However this has also happened with Win XP and Office 2003.

Thanks,
Frank