We are distrubuting our application as an MDE - and that appears prevent us from allowing users to use the report creation wizard. Is there a way to enable it? Should we distribute as an MDB and somehow protect the forms and code a different way?

The users should not be allowed to create their own objects in a shared database. What happens if you want to make updates to it? What happens if they corrupt it? They are not programmers and there's a lot of bad stuff they could do.

Better to let them each build their own front end .mdb on their local drive and link to the shared tables in the network back end.