MS Access 97 deprotection?

An acquaintence of mine who runs a small consulting 
business here in Massachusetts called last night.

     He seems to be suffering from one of the classic 
aftereffects of a having 'disgruntled, 
about-to-be-ex-employee'; one of the database files on 
which his business relies has been encrypted within 
Microsoft Access 97, and he needs to recover the data.

A quick look around at the obvious sites shows no generic
de-protector, as there are for MS Word and many other systems.
Anyone have any clue how he might get his data back? (I've
already told him to consider the lawyer-based route).

Send me mail - I'll pass it on to him.

thanks,

Peter Trei
trei@process.com