Illustrator CS3 losing links...

Question

I'm researching this on behalf of a very confused studio team and IT dept. Here is the scenario as far as I understand. We do a lot of "pop and chip" advertising with the products staying fairly constant and the price/promos as well as the creative "backgrounds" constantly changing. For a typical new job, our studio will simply pickup last month's files and drop-in the new creative in the background and alter the price.
Here is the problem, we've got a few different image libraries that hold all the various categories of products. On any given job they'll open last month's version, swap out a few products, leave a few others untouched and then update all the links. The problem is that when the next person opens the job, some of the links (usually the products that weren't touched) have been lost. They'll have to re-link them all again manually every time. The problem is sporadic and hard to anticipate. These guys do about 100 of these a day so updating the links constantly can really kill them.
So, in case my point has been lost here, we can't figure out why they keep sporadically losing the links. I know it sounds vague but I said I'd try.

Answer 1

Perhaps they are in use by someone else and they did some alteration or editing say on their desktop and then move the item back to the original directory on your server. And though it is where it is supposed to be and still called what it i called t is actually not there. If you get what I mean.
This may not be the problem but it could be something like it regarding the server itself. Perhaps some updating of a profile or corruption of such has it confused.
And then it could be some compatibility problem with the server and Illustrator.
I think you understand what I mean.