Photo files disappearing when touched by iPhoto

In my workgroup, a common iPhoto library has been shared by all our users (about three of us) for years, served via AFP by Mac OS X Server 10.3.9.
In the last few weeks, one of our users has reported this same problem: She tries to drag the photo from iPhoto to her desktop, but gets the not permitted cursor. When I go to look at the damage, I see that either the photos are missing from the Library file structure or there is a stub of a file left of about 12K. This is really frightening.
I posted this message originally Oct. 24 without any replies. Anyone's help would be greatly appreciated.

I will answer your questions in order.
1. No files were touched in the iPhoto Library folder until I did some investigating, and even then I didn't move anything. Also, as a troubleshooting technique, I rebuilt the library (through iPhoto, of course).
2, 3, & 4. Everyone in the workgroup belongs to the same group, and everyone's NSUmask is set to 2, so every file gets created with permissions 775 (read-write-execute by owner and group, read only by other people) regardless of the program writing it. Naturally, every file and folder in the hierarchy is readable and writable by everyone who needs to.
Thanks for asking!

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