MS Access gets protective over its relationships

When building things from scratch with ASP/Access, I never use any of the “advanced” features of access, such as relationships, as I don’t need the Access GUI to manage this stuff for me, as the logic and relationships are managed by the ASP code, and SQL queries instead. This means that I often forget these things are in place when I extend someone elses web app – I had a full-on fist fight with an Access database that wouldn’t let me delete records from a table because it contained relationships (with itself). In the end I had to go into the access GUI and delete the relationships altogether for that table. Obviously now i’m wondering what the knock-on effects will be…