Minty, if Novice1 has no error handling, he has error handling from the Access "last-chance" handler that catches traps that no other handler catches. Remember that traps are caught by the thing nearest the top of the stack that has a declared trap handler, but the bottom of the stack always has one. You just don't want that one to fire because of what it might do to your application.
Novice, we need a few details of your configuration (high-level). You say this happens for one user only, and that other users are OK. Are we talking "shared database" or "shared front-end" or "user runs local copy of the front-end" or what? How many users are we talking about?
If the answer is "shared database" OR "shared front-end" (opened by many users at once because it is opened from the main server), you may have an "open exclusive" problem in that, if configured incorrectly, your database might not allow sharing of the file by simultaneous users.
There is also the possibility that the user's registry is not in synch with the other users. It would be an obscure setting in the HKEY_LOCAL_USER/Software hive in that case, and there is where I have to step away.