> I am baffled - I have NEVER seen that root cannot access a file.

hmmmm...that ADSO33.DAT looks suspiciously like the convention used by
another popular operating system...

so: the file system in use by the partition in which ADSO33.DAT lives
is what?

that partition is mounted read/write? right? a local (to the user)
partition, or on the net and shared?

or, is this *.DAT in the customer's /home on a Linux formatted partition?

has it been fsck'ed in living memory? are there errors found now, if
checked? after checking, is there anything i /home/lost+found ?

the permissions of the directory the file is in is what?

has s/he accessed that directory while logged into KDE/Gnome/other
Linux GUI as root?

if *DAT is inside /home on a linux formatted partition--from inside
user's /home, do this and copy/paste to here:

ls -hal .ICE*

--
.~.
/V\
/( )\
natural^^-^^pilot