Cannot Unlock Object

Question

Migration to CS4 has created a serious problem for me, which will cost many hundreds of man-hours to repair, possibly thousands. This is what happened.
I design collectors cards with InDesign. On a template file, the master layout is copied to the document pages; only two being front and back of the card. The template then has a logo placed into one of the frames. The logo is a CMYK illustrator file. For some reason this was very fiddly to get into position, as the illustrator file seemed to have borders or bleed areas outside the image area that interfered with placement. Hence, at great magnification on my screen I positioned the image area of the file into the frame where the logo should appear.
After that many thousands of cards were made. This is a huge investment in manhours over more than 2 years.
When opening in CS4, the file asks to remake the link for the logo, after which the logo position is changed, and is broken. It seems that someone will have to fix each of these files manually, a huge task. But to make matters worse, the files have changed in some way, and it is not possible to unlock the logo. The only way to fix this is to unlock the frame, and delete it. Then manually make a new frame and place the logo anew. This will be a horrific amount of work, but I see no other option unless I can unlock the logo image and reposition it (also a horrific amount of work, but less ruinous).
Can anyone suggest to me how I might be able to unlock the logo image?
I tried to attach the .indt file to this post, but that was not allowed.

Answer 1

Hi Peter,
Thanks for your comment.
This problem came about when I received a batch of cards from my proof-reader. She has copies of everything on her computer taken from my server, including the original Illustrator file of the logo, but since the copy to her system was seen by the InDesign file of the card layout as a different file, she updated the link. When I got the file back, the system saw my original as a different file and again asked to update the link. But when updating the link the system positioned the image incorrectly.
I then opened the original Illustrator file in CS4 to see if the image boundaries had been changed. They were not, and when I exported it as a PNG file, the image did not include any of the art-board or bleed area outside of the image that I wanted. Unfortunately, this act of opening, saving and closing, caused the logo to become improperly positioned on all the card files, even those not coming back from the proof-reader. There are thousands of these!
The bounding box for the logo on the InDesign file is made in the master layer, but has been copied to the document layer. When I use the select tool I do not get a dotted border on the document page, but when I examine the master layer, of course, I see a dotted border; but it becomes a solid border when I select it. Since this file was originally made in CS2 several years ago, I am not certainly any more whether I imported the image into the master layer, or later into the document layer. In any case, I cannot see the logo at all in the master layer; only the dotted bounding box.
When I look at the document layer, I can unlock the position of the bounding box (solid line) and delete it. The image also vanishes. This, I believe, shows that I must have put the linked image into the layout on the document layer, not the master layer. After this, the master layer dotted bounding box can still be seen when the master layer is selected. If I proceed this way on all the files, I will need to copy the empty bounding box for the logo into the document layer (Hmm, cannot remember how this is done) and then re-attach the image file. I think this will be a horrendous massive amount of work for many thousands of cards. Oh dear.
The zip file is attached.
Benjamin