Working Around Architecture Mismatch Errors When Using Microsoft Access

From time to time, our customers ask us what their options are when their attempt to use an Access database as their application's back end fails with:

[Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager]The specified DSN contains an architecture mismatch between the Driver and Application

The cause of the problem is the architecture of the driver used to connect to Access is different to that of their application, i.e. they are attempting to use a 64-bit Access driver with 32-bit application. They end up in this situation because recent versions of Access use the ACCDB format for their database files, and the Access driver for ACCDB files is 64-bit only.

(The driver in question is an ODBC driver for Access. ODBC is a data access technology that enables applications to connect to any database for which an ODBC driver is available.)

Given this situation, the following workarounds are available: