Network folder hidden or private.

[BuzzStPoint]

Little bit of a long story so bear with me.
Office environment with 5 computers all networked.

We installed a finger print time clock system. The FP scanner is installed and hooked up with a USB to one main computer. Then we have 3 other computers that can run reports. There is network software that allows us to run reports and reconcile time cards. Once pay period ended, we found a problem.

The program the runs the time clock is database driven. After running the reports we noticed one employee was punched in 4 days in a row exactly on time. This employee is never on time or early. Alway 5-15 minutes late. I ran another report on the actual punches and seen they were different. Looking in the even log there were no events that showed the time card was adjusted. So my only conclusion is this employee adjusted the time card by editing the database. (MS access is installed on all PC's)

So how can I protect the database folder both locally and via network and still allow the network application to be able to connect?

All machines are XP Professional.

[BrokenAtari]

You can protect it if you deploy active directory. Then set share permissions via users. Another way to protect it and to remove the writing permission to over the network. So you can only read it from the network.