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