SQL Server performance question

[doctorgonzo]

I don't know how many SQL Server experts there are out there, but I'll toss this one out to see if anybody bites.

I've got a database running on SQL Server 2000, with a couple dozen tables, four or five of them large. In one of the large ones (~250K records), I have an IMAGE field for storing OLE objects, mainly Word files. I am using Access as a front end to get to the data, and very recently, when a person opens up an attached file from within the database, everybody else is locked out of that table.

I took a look at the locking with sp_lock and I found that when an attached file is opened, thousands and thousands of data pages are being locked. Is this normal? It doesn't seem so. Is there anything that can be done to fix this? I'm not the DBA, so my options are limited, but I would like to know why this started happening. TIA.