I need help on Capabilities of Microsoft Access 97 (Urgent !)

[hiptino]

I'm currently testing a retail application.The application requires that users(up to 50 or more,from remote
Win 95/98/NT workstations) frequently (2secs or less) update rows in Access 97 database on another workstation via Visual Basic 6 front-end using ADO 2.0.
When reading rows I used (adForwardOnly/adLockReadOnly)
When updating rows I used (adKeyset/adLockoptimistic)

Due to limited resources, I'm testing the application on a single Win 98 computer. I simulated a 10-users scenario by running 10 instances of the application(.exe) on that single computer. The 10 instances worked fine for about 2min, but later popped up ADO error 3705 -
("The operation requested by the application is not allowed
if the object is open&quot.
I guess the error came up because I'm running all the instances on same computer(i.e Trying to open a connection object that is already opened)

My questions:

a)
Can Access 97 handle such high frequency row updates?
If not I need a recommendation on database to use. If it can, could you recommend a data access technique that would be efficient?

b)
Could you please recommend a software testing technique?

c)
How many users can Microsoft Access concurrently handle without data access conflicts ?


Thank you.